This dissertation examined the presidential elections of 1992, 1996 and 2000 for the narrative tools used to persuade Latino voters. Using Walt Fisher's narrative theory, I evaluated the various parts of the American Dream myth, looking specifically at the characters and settings used in the candidate's narrative. Then, I evaluated the values in those narratives through the lens of the Plan of Delano, specifically looking for ways these candidates actually reinforced important Latino values. The new tellings of the American Dream myth valued specific characters- characters that had been blessed by the American Dream. Clinton's 1992 character had to work to gain success, but he was also blessed. George P. Bush (George W. Bush's nephew) was another character blessed by the American Dream. As a first-generation American, he represented the hope that brings many to America; the idea that their children could have opportunities the parents could not. The settings of the American Dream story were also important. These settings varied greatly-from the decrepit and desolate to the fanciful and idyllic-but they represented all the different places where the American Dream is possible. Hope, Arkansas is not a place where much hope seems to exist. But even a community as impoverished as Hope can be the birthplace of a President, because of the amazing ability of the Dream to permeate even the darkest corners of America. The barrios of the Southwest appear to be hopeless, but as Clinton's telling of the myth reminded Latinos, even people growing up in the barrios should have hope-because the American Dream can exist anywhere. These values, these characters, these settings have added to the rich rhetorical history of the American Dream myth. These presidential candidates expanded the places where that hope could reach, and the people who could be blessed by the Dream. All of this culminated in a story that Latinos could relate to, that they shared in and that rhetorically persuaded them to believe in these candidates.

During Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm, George H.W. Bush achieved the rhetorical success that had escaped his prior speaking endeavors. If the aforementioned assessments regarded Bush’s Gulf War rhetoric as a rhetorical triumph, in light of prior damning criticism of his rhetorical abilities, then an explanation for that triumph is in order. Bush’s rhetoric differed from his Presidential predecessors by virtue of two factors. First, as the first U.S. president of the Post-Cold War era, Bush’s rhetoric faced different rhetorical constraints than those faced by his predecessors, as he no longer had the narrative framework of the Cold War to explain U.S. foreign policy action. Second, Bush rhetorically juxtaposed American exceptionalism and realism within his rhetoric itself. This differed from the rhetoric of his immediate predecessor, Ronald Reagan, whose rhetoric employed American exceptionalism without reference to realism, although that rhetoric was strategically geared toward achieving realist foreign policy ends. Bush’s success was also considerable in that he faced significant rhetorical constraints created or exacerbated by Reagan. Reagan’s reputation as the “Great Communicator,” contrasted with Bush’s less-than-stellar reputation as an orator, makes Bush’s rhetorical success particularly worth understanding. President George H.W. Bush relied on three particular arguments to facilitate a U.S. military victory during the 1991 Persian Gulf War. These arguments differed considerably from foreign policy arguments offered by the Reagan administration with respect to the manner in which they addressed issues concerning the United Nations and the Vietnam War. First, Bush promoted U.N. diplomacy as a subsidiary of U.S. foreign policy. For Bush, the U.N. served as a venue where world opinion could be galvanized and action serving United States interests would not be constrained so much as legitimized. Second, he compared and contrasted U.S. action in the Gulf to the Vietnam War. In doing so, he combined the moral urgency of prior foreign policy efforts with the hindsight necessary to avoid a repeat of the American experience in Vietnam. Third, in retrospectively assessing the Gulf War, Bush depicted the conflict as a discrete foreign policy event in which he narrowly defined victory. Bush defined victory as the removal of Iraqi forces from Kuwait, in an attempt to shape a historical consensus on the significance of U.S. action.

Despite longstanding attention to rhetorical form and structuring logics that give discourse its persuasive power (metaphor, genre, narrative, definitional frames, ideology, etc.), the relative amount of publication attending to international rhetoric remains slight. As the composition of audience(s) has stretched to global proportions the challenges of apprehending the manifold cross-cultural complexities for presidential address have expanded. Spanning five decades and three presidencies (Kennedy, H.W. Bush and Clinton), this dissertation takes presidential public address at the United Nations as its object of study in an effort to help remedy this shortcoming, while also aiming to provide a richer theoretical underpinning for accounts of globalization and its impact on the modern presidency. The analysis grapples with three particular problems: conceptualizing increasingly pluralized audiences, the matter of ascertaining how non-American institutions (like the United Nations) shape and are shaped by American rhetorical productions, and the difficulties in gauging presidential rhetorical efficacy. Two main arguments are advanced. First, the dissertation argues that presidential rhetoric at the United Nations traffics in a particular brand of cosmopolitanism, which helps presidents to constitute a universal audience nonetheless ideologically sympathetic to American goals. The terrain and implications of this cosmopolitanism rhetoric are mapped and unpacked. Second, it is argued that when crafting rhetoric for the specific audience of the United Nations General Assembly, the President is obligated to work within the confines of the rhetorical institution that is the United Nations. The project seeks to understand the limits and possibilities of presidential rhetoric based on existing international institutional constraints. Taken together, the resulting scene of presidential cosmopolitan address, rather than culminating in efforts primarily concentrated on persuasion, end up mainly interpellating a global audience supportive of a cosmopolitan agenda which in turn is pre-structured to support the interests of the United States.

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While addiction narratives have been a feature of American culture at least since the early 19th century’s temperance tales, the creation of the Johnson Intervention in the late 1960s and the corresponding advent of the War on Drugs waged by U.S. Presidents have wrought significant changes in the stories told about addiction and recovery. These changes reflect broader changes in conceptions of agency and the relationship of subject to culture in the postmodern era. In the way that it iterates the imperatives of the War on Drugs initiated by Richard Nixon, the rhetoric of successive U.S. Presidents provides a compelling heuristic for analyzing popular and literary texts as reflective of the changing shape of addiction and recovery narratives over the last half century. Johnson, by defining addiction, not intoxication, as a break with reality, argued that confronting addicts with narratives of the potential crises could convince them to seek treatment before they hit bottom. Johnson’s version of “reality therapy” thus presented threatened or simulated crises, rather than real ones. Examining presidential rhetoric and popular culture representations of addiction—in horror movies, “very special episodes,” and reality television—this dissertation identifies features of the postmodern Intervention and recovery narrative in fiction by William Peter Blatty, Stephen King, Jay McInerney, Tama Janowitz, David Foster Wallace, and Jess Walter. I demonstrate how the Intervention is key to understanding the cultural products of the War on Drugs and its continued salience in American culture.

American civil religion is a topic in which there is a lot of interest but very little current scholarly activity. This is primarily due to there currently being no common understanding of American civil religion, hindering progress in the field. The first purpose of the dissertation is to rectify this situation by creating a solid theoretical understanding of American civil religion from which scholarship can progress. The second purpose of the dissertation is to examine the development of the American civil religion through history. This includes an interesting dynamic given the civil religion's purpose of promoting a shared identity. The process of promoting a shared identity involves defining the social group in question. When 'outsiders' enter the community, conflict ensues. Typically, the conflict continues until the parameters of the civil religion is enlarged, incorporating the new group. This is a continuing cycle within the American civil religion. Looking at this broad framework, one will able to see both the continuity and change from the founding period to the current version of the American civil religion. / text

A number of presidents have aided the auto industry, protected it from external threats, or saved it from collapse, while presidential rhetoric about the industry is positive and consistent across political parties and over time. I conduct rhetorical analyses of the entire history of presidential speech about the industry to explain the evolution of the relationship between these two institutions. I argue that this relationship is an example of the institutionalization of speech; perfunctory campaign praise became habitual and eventually coalesced into a rhetorical legacy that entailed rhetorical and material resources and constraints for the institution of the presidency. In the case of the auto industry, presidents sought political support from the auto industry as a constituency, erased blameworthy aspects of industry history, and created an industry identity that was exceptional, which served as justification for defense of the industry and intervention during periods of economic recession, regulatory stress, foreign competition, and imminent collapse of an automaker. Such cases of institutionalized speech between the presidency and other institutions are special, but not unique; this case provides an instructive example of how speech becomes legacy over time, and of what the consequences of such legacies might include for this case and for possible others.

The purpose of this project is to examine the visual political ad hominem arguments used on Instagram during the 2016 presidential campaign. Using Walton’s (2007) five subtypes of ad hominem arguments, this study analyzes the “attack ads” posted on Instagram from five of the 2016 presidential candidates into each subtype. This project seeks to understand how ad hominem arguments within political rhetoric function when they are visual. This study uses Kress and van Leeuwen’s (2006) theory of modality and Rose’s (2012) compositional interpretation to analyze compositional structure of the image and parallels this analysis with ad hominem subtypes. Findings reveal the abusive (direct) subtype as the most commonly used which aligns with traditional or popular uses of Instagram as a social networking site aimed at sharing personal events and stories. The abusive (direct) subtype is an ad hominem that attacks a respondent’s moral character, or ethos, rather than their argument or biases or inconsistencies. The visual abusive (direct) arguments used by the candidates largely targeted their opponents personally which parallels the popular uses of the medium Instagram.

In this thesis the author explores the portrayal of immigrants in the USA, more specifically how immigrants were portrayed by the last three presidents; Donald J. Trump, Barack Obama, and George W. Bush. While the majority of the US society sees immigration as a strength, the attitudes towards immigration remain divided within the political blocks. By the means of a critical discourse analysis I explore in which way presidential rhetoric has portrayed immigrants, and what are the differences in how the selected presidents have led the debate on immigration. Through the concepts of the ‘Other’ and ‘enemy images, and with an application of social identity theory, the author of this thesis further discusses the processes of intergroup comparison and its effects on the relationship between immigrants and natives.

The rhetorical presidency encompasses all the ways a president communicates and acts. These rhetorical elements of the job are not prescribed in the Constitution and as a result it is the presidents themselves who help shape the cultural understanding of presidentiality, of what it means to be president. When President Barack Obama participated in a "Slow Jam the News" comedy sketch on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon in 2012, he took the rhetorical presidency to a place it had never been before. This choice established a new genre of presidential rhetoric that President Obama would rely on throughout his time in the White House—communicating directly to target audiences via the YouTube bully pulpit. The aim of this thesis is twofold: first, provide historical context for presidents utilizing comedy and new forms of mass media for political ends; and second, rhetorically analyze select comedic YouTube videos to reveal how President Obama reshaped the rhetorical presidency to create new opportunities to succeed both culturally and politically.