Introduction

In the winter of 2005, Rhetoric & Public Affairs published a special issue on the 2004 presidential campaign. Expertly edited by Shawn and Trevor Parry Giles, the special issue covered a wide range of topics, from the "Moral Framing of the War on Terrorism," by Christian Spielvogel, to the "Sex and the City Voter" by Karrin Vasby Anderson and Jessie Stewart. Also included in that special issue was the first article ever published in a communication-related journal on a little-known senator named Barack Obama. The dual (or was it dueling?) article by David A. Frank and Mark Lawrence McPhail, one praising Obama's speech to the 2004 Democratic National Convention and the other finding fault with it, was a masterpiece of point-counterpoint criticism. Given the success of this earlier issue, I gave serious thought to repeating the procedure with respect to the 2008 presidential campaign. Then I received a call from Jack Selzer.

Professor Selzer, as many of our readers know, is a much-decorated teacher of rhetoric in the English Department at Penn State University. At the time of the call—an email actually—Jack was serving as the principal program planner for the biennial meeting of the Rhetoric Society of America, scheduled to take place in Seattle in May 2008. His request was straightforward: Would I organize a super-session focused on the 2008 presidential primaries? I asked Jack for a week or so to scope out the land. If I were going to organize such a session with the moniker "super" attached to it, I had better be able to deliver a super program, or so I reasoned. So I did what any good scholar would do under such circumstances—I called my friends. Fortunately, the ones I called happened also to be some of the world's leading experts in presidential discourse. The first three people I contacted—Denise Bostdorff, Robert Ivie, and John Murphy—all said yes, and thus was born a super-session at RSA.

We divided the field among ourselves, with Bostdorff agreeing to cover discourses about the Iraq War, Ivie focusing on the rhetoric of terrorism, and Murphy tackling the economic discourses. I would focus on social issues and we would have covered, as best that four people could do, the terrain as it appeared to us in August 2007. But, of course, terrains change rapidly during presidential campaigns. What had appeared to be the main issue in August 2007, the Iraq War, soon began to fade into the background. Economic issues pushed their way to the forefront, along with such related issues as immigration, health care costs, energy, and employment. And the social issues, so prominent in the 2004 campaign with state-level debates over gay marriage, ended up playing only a small role in 2008. Even so, we had plenty of discourse with which to work.

Both the pre-primary (January–December 2007) and primary (January– June 2008) seasons provided notable moments where rhetorical discourse played a central role in defining the candidates and appealing to the electorate. Perhaps no single moment was more important than the speech delivered on March 18, 2008, by Barack Obama, in which he reflected on the topic of race in America. As only the second serious African American candidate for the nomination of the Democratic Party, Obama's entire campaign could have been derailed by the pronouncements of his longtime pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright. But instead of derailing the campaign, Wright's caustic comments became the occasion for one of the most profound campaign speeches in American history. The only problem was that we had not planned on a history-making speech being given between August 2007 and May 2008. How could one run a special issue on the primaries without dealing, in some way, with the single most important speech of the campaign? It couldn't be done. So in the summer of 2008, following the May meeting at which the papers by Bostdorff, Ivie and Giner, Medhurst, and Murphy were first presented, I asked another of my friends, David Frank, if he would prepare an essay on Obama's famous speech in...