Gunawan, Samuel (2011) Magnifying Persuasion in Obama’s Democratic Nomination Speech. In: Language in the Online and Offline World 2, May 31 - June, 2011, Petra Christian University, Surabaya.
Abstract
Barack Obama’s nomination acceptance speech as a Democratic presidential candidate on August 28, 2008 – in Denver, Colorado was a historic event in the American politics as the Democratic National Convention finally nominated him as the first African-American presidential candidate. Obama’s rise from a zero to a hero deserves a close scrutiny in the way he powerfully and eloquently amplified the power of his persuasive messages to drive home the points of his political lines of thought, agenda, and planned course of actions for the future of the nation in his Democratic acceptance speech: “The American Promise”. The speech highlighted a clear-cut line of distinction between his much stronger political position as a Democratic presidential candidate and that of his Republican rival – John McCain. This paper is an atttempt to explore and elucidate Obama’s outstanding rhetorical skills for asserting and highlighting his significant points of persuasion by means the sound bites, for appealing to his audience’s ears of the messages being delivered by means of the sound devices, and the various means for amplifying powerfully his persuasive messages that received repeated thunderous cheers and applauses of the big crowd of his 86,000 direct supporters in Denver and finally brought him to the White House in the following D-day of the U.S. presidential election in November, 2008.
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