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Abstract
This essay explores Barack Obama's invocation of the Exodus during his 2008 presidential campaign. It argues Obama's turn to Exodus, his rare embodiment of Joshua, and his renewal of the American covenant nicely addressed major rhetorical problems that he faced. Of equal importance, his campaign oratory opens an important line of inquiry into the relationship between social order and critique in this idiom. Obama's discourse induces us to examine anew the possibilities for social and political change suggested by the Exodus.
Acknowledgments
Versions of this essay were presented at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and at the Rhetoric, Politics, and the Obama Phenomenon Conference at Texas A & M University. I thank the organizer of the “Obamanon” conference, Jennifer R. Mercieca, and David Tell for his fine response to this paper. I am also grateful to James Jasinski for our many conversations about these issues
Notes
1. Barack Obama, “Remarks By The President To The NAACP Convention,” July 16, 2009, http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/remarks-president-naacp-centennial-convention-07162009.
2. Robert C. Rowland and John M. Jones, “Recasting the American Dream and American Politics: Barack Obama's Keynote Address to the 2004 Democratic National Convention,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 93 (2007): 430; David A. Frank and Mark Lawrence McPhail, “Barack Obama's Address to the 2004 Democratic National Convention: Trauma, Compromise, Consilience, and the (Im)possibility of Racial Reconciliation,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 8 (2005): 572; James Darsey, “Barack Obama and America's Journey,” Southern Communication Journal 74 (2009): 88–103; Martin J. Medhurst, “Barack Obama's 2009 Inaugural Address: Narrative Signature and Interpretation” (paper presented at the conference on Reason, Action, and Justification Honoring David Zarefsky, Evanston, IL, May 2009). The quotation from the Frank and McPhail essay appears to be Frank's contribution to this unusual and powerful critical dialogue. Other recent essays on Obama's rhetoric appear to pick up this theme without explicitly citing it. See, for instance, Donovan S. Conley, “Virtuoso,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 5 (2008): 307–11; Robert L. Ivie & Oscar Giner, “American Exceptionalism in a Democratic Idiom: Transacting the Mythos of Change in the 2008 Presidential Campaign,” Communication Studies 60 (2009): 359–75; Robert E. Terrill, “Unity and Duality in Barack Obama's ‘A More Perfect Union,’” Quarterly Journal of Speech 95 (2009): 363–86.
3. David A. Frank, “The Prophetic Voice and the Face of the Other in Barack Obama's ‘A More Perfect Union’ Address, March 18, 2008,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 12 (2009): 167, 172. For accounts of the ways in which the Exodus tradition specifically and the black church generally infused African American freedom discourse, see, for example: Michael Battle, The Black Church in America: African American Christian Spirituality (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2006); Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., Exodus! Religion, Race, and Nation in Early Nineteenth-Century America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000); David Howard-Pitney, The African American Jeremiad: Appeals for Justice in America (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2005); Jonathan Rieder, The Word of the Lord is Upon Me: The Righteous Performance of Martin Luther King, Jr. (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008); Gary S. Selby, Martin Luther King and the Rhetoric of Freedom: The Exodus Narrative in America's Struggle for Civil Rights (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2008).
4. Barack Obama, “Selma Voting Rights March Commemoration at Brown Chapel,” March 4, 2007, http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/barackobama/barackobamabrownechapel.htm, 3. This is one of those texts that make one angry with the “Internets.” Originally, americanrhetoric.com had a text up with an embedded video of the speech. The video differed in a number of ways, a few significant, from the text. I printed the text and corrected my copy from the video. Since that time, americanrhetoric has altered its link, dumping one directly to Obama's old website, where the flawed text is still up but the embed is not. Various excerpts are up around the web, but I have not been able to locate the video of the entire speech.
5. James Plastaras, C.M., The God of Exodus: The Theology of the Exodus Narratives (Milwaukee, WI: The Bruce Publishing Company, 1966), 24.
6. Michael Walzer, Exodus and Revolution (New York: Basic Books, 1985), 12.
7. Plastaras, The God of Exodus, 22.
8. Plastaras, The God of Exodus, 24.
9. Sacvan Bercovitch, The Puritan Origins of the American Self (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1975); Sacvan Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978); Sacvan Bercovitch, The Rites of Assent: Transformations in the Symbolic Construction of America (New York: Routledge, 1993). For a vigorous dissent from this thesis, see David Harlan, “A People Blinded From Birth: American History According to Sacvan Bercovitch,” The Journal of American History, 78 (1991): 949–71. For an argument dissociating the black church from this domination thesis, see Glaude, Jr., Exodus!, 45–53. For continuing discussion of the Exodus, the Puritan tradition, the jeremiad, and the containment thesis within communication/rhetorical studies, see Ernest G. Bormann, “Fetching Good Out of Evil: A Rhetorical Use of Calamity,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 63 (1977): 130–39; Kurt W. Ritter, “American Political Rhetoric and the Jeremiad Tradition: Presidential Nomination Acceptance Addresses, 1960–1976,” Central States Speech Journal 31 (1980): 153–71; John M. Murphy, “‘A Time of Shame and Sorrow’: Robert F. Kennedy and the American Jeremiad,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 76 (1990): 401–14; James Jasinski, “Rearticulating History in Epideictic Discourse: Frederick Douglass's ‘The Meaning of the Fourth of July to the Negro,’” in Rhetoric and Political Culture in Nineteenth-Century America, ed. Thomas W. Benson (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 1997), 71–89; James Jasinski, “Orchestrating Idioms and Voices: Performative Traditions in King's “A Time to Break Silence” (paper presented at the meeting of the National Communication Association, Nov. 1999); Patricia Roberts-Miller, Voices in the Wilderness: Public Discourse and the Paradox of Puritan Rhetoric (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1999); A. Susan Owen, “Memory, War and American Identity: Saving Private Ryan as Cinematic Jeremiad,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 19 (2002): 249–82; Selby, Martin Luther King, 2008; James Jasinski and John M. Murphy, “Time, Space, and Generic Reconstruction: Martin Luther King's ‘A Time to Break Silence’ as Radical Jeremiad,” in Public Address and Moral Judgment, ed. Shawn Parry-Giles and Trevor Parry-Giles (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2009), 97–126.
10. Bercovitch, Rites of Assent, 59.
11. George M. Frederickson, The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on African American Character and Destiny, 1817–1914 (1971; rpt. Middleton, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1987); James Jasinski, “Constituting Antebellum African American Identity: Resistance, Violence, and Masculinity in Henry Highland Garnet's (1843) ‘Address to the Slaves,’ ” Quarterly Journal of Speech 93 (2007): 27–57.
12. For a discussion of these issues in the context of the term “equality,” see Celeste Michelle Condit and John Louis Lucaites, Crafting Equality: America's Anglo-African Word (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). In particular, the discussion of King, Malcolm X, and their successors in chapter 7 illustrates this inventional dilemma. In a more general sense, their persistent notice of an integrationist and separatist sense of equality resonates with the two personae I note above. A similar bifurcation between reformist and revolutionary rhetoric flows through the social movement literature. See Herbert W. Simons, “Requirements, Problems, and Strategies: A Theory of Persuasion for Social Movements,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 56 (1970): 1–11.
13. Richard Wolffe, Renegade: The Making of a President (New York: Crown Publishing, 2009), 163.
14. Wolffe, Renegade, 143.
15. Wolffe, Renegade, 143–44.
16. Wolffe, Renegade,144.
17. William Jelani Cobb, The Substance of Hope: Barack Obama and the Paradox of Progress (New York: Walker and Company, 2010), 65.
18. Gwen Ifill writes, “In August 2007, Leonard Pitts Jr., a columnist for the Miami Herald, decided to count up the ‘black enough’ references. He discovered 464 instances where Obama's name was linked with the phrase–the first dating to 2003.” Gwen Ifill, The Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama (New York: Doubleday, 2009), 160. In his germinal essay on “The Joshua Generation,” David Remnick traces the “black enough” canard to Obama's early political career in Chicago. David Remnick, “The Joshua Generation: Race and the Campaign of Barack Obama,” The New Yorker, November 17, 2008. Retrieved from http://www.newyorker.com.
19. Ifill, The Breakthrough, 11. See also, Cobb, Substance, 95–115.
20. J. Maxwell Miller and Gene M. Tucker, The Cambridge Bible Commentary On The New English Bible: The Book of Joshua (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974), 3. See also A. Graeme Auld, Joshua, Judges, and Ruth (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1984), 1–4.
21. Gene M. Tucker, “Joshua, The Book of” in The Oxford Companion to the Bible, ed. Bruce M. Metzger and Michael D. Coogan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 385.
22. Tucker, “Joshua,” 385.
23. John Lewis, “Introduction,” in A Call to Conscience: The Landmark Speeches of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., ed. Clayborne Carson and Kris Shephard (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2002), 114.
24. Martin Luther King, Jr., “Address at the Conclusion of the Selma to Montgomery March,” Call to Conscience, 127.
25. Lewis, “Introduction,” 116.
26. Obama, “Selma,” 2. Subsequent references to this speech will appear in the body of the essay.
27. The “house divided” phrase was part of a warning Jesus gave to those who did not believe in his divinity. It can be found in: Matthew 12:25, Mark 3:25, and Luke 11:17. Scholarship on the “House Divided” speech has traditionally identified the “house” as the Union, but Michael William Pfau argues “the house” also refers to the Republican party. In that way, it admirably suited Obama's desire to create a unified Democratic house under his leadership. Michael William Pfau, “The House that Abe Built: The ‘House Divided’ Speech and Republican Party Politics,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 2 (1999): 625–51.
28. The Reverend Otis Moss, Jr., was “an important figure in the black church, a trustee of Morehouse College, a former co-pastor, with Martin Luther King, Sr., at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta.” He was also the father of Otis Moss III, who was slated to replace the Reverend Jeremiah Wright at Trinity United Church of Christ, Obama's church, in Chicago. This was a nice imprimatur for Obama's authority. David Remnick, The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama (New York: Alfred A, Knopf, 2010), 18–19.
29. Martin Luther King, Jr., “I've Been to the Mountaintop,” in A Call to Conscience, 201–23. There have been several fine critiques of this speech. Among them are: Bethany Keeley, “I May Not Get There With You: ‘I've Been to the Mountaintop’ as Epic Discourse,” Southern Communication Journal 73 (2008): 280–94; Michael Osborn, “I've Been to the Mountaintop: Critic as Participant,” in Texts in Context: Critical Dialogues on Significant Episodes in American Political Rhetoric, ed. Michael C. Leff and Fred J. Kauffeld (Davis, CA: Hermagoras Press, 1989), 149–66; Joseph W. Wenzel, “A Dangerous Unselfishness: Martin Luther King, Jr.'s speech at Memphis, April 3, 1968: A Response to Osborne,” in Texts in Context, 167–80.
30. Bercovitch, Jeremiad, 67–68.
31. Bercovitch, Jeremiad; George B. Forgie, Patricide in the House Divided: A Psychological Interpretation of Lincoln and His Age (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1979).
32. Anthony Tyrrell Hanson, “Typology,” in The Oxford Companion to the Bible, ed. Bruce M. Metzger and Michael D. Coogan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 783–84.
33. Remnick, “Joshua Generation,” 1.
34. For instance, see: Ryan L. Cole, “Clintonian Obama,” June 19, 2008. http://spectator.org/archives/2008/06/19/clintonian-obama. Website of The American Spectator.
35. J. L. Houlden, “Conversion,” in The Oxford Companion to the Bible, 133. See also, John M. Murphy, “Power and Authority in a Postmodern Presidency,” in The Prospect of Presidential Rhetoric, ed. James Arnt Aune and Martin J. Medhurst (College Station: Texas A & M University Press, 2008), 132–33.
36. “Another theme that runs through the book is the relationship between obedience and blessing. Although Israel receives the land as an unmerited gift, in fulfillment of the promise to the ancestors, she will remain in the land and enjoy its fruits so long as the people are faithful to the covenant. The meaning of faithfulness is expressed in the law (even understood as the ‘book of the law,’ 1.8) and the covenant stipulations (8.30–35; 21. 13–20; 23.66–13; 24.14–28). Above all, this relationship between obedience and blessing is a corporate rather than an individualistic one. As the story of Achan indicates (chap.7), the people as a whole may suffer for the sins of some of its members.” Tucker, “Joshua,” 387.
37. Happily for him, the Senator received an appropriate introduction: “ ‘Forty years have gone by since Dr. King's death,’ said Reverend Raphael Warnock, 38, pastor of Ebenezer Baptist. ‘In biblical terms, the number forty holds powerful symbolism.’ He let the words hang. The Ebenezer faithful know that forty is the number of days God unleashed the fury waters of the Old Testament; the age of the prophet Muhammad when the Koran was revealed to him; the number of years the children of Israel wandered before entering the Promised Land.” Cobb, Substance, 95–96.
38. Barack Obama, “The Great Need of the Hour,” January 20, 2008. http://www.barackobama.com/2008/01/20/remarks_of_senator_obama_40.php. Subsequent references will be by page number in the text.
39. Chaim Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca, The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argumentation, trans. John Wilkinson and Purcell Weaver (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1969), 115–20.
40. Auld, Joshua, Judges, and Ruth, 9.
41. Auld, Joshua, Judges, and Ruth, 9–11.
42. Auld, Joshua, Judges, and Ruth, 9.
43. For an extended discussion of King's beloved community, see Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Sermonic Power of Public Discourse, ed. Carolyn Calloway-Thomas and John Louis Lucaites (Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 1993).
44. Thomas Farrell most clearly explains the concept of rhetoric as dynamis. See Norms of Rhetorical Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993): 63–72. Note, in particular, his discussion of the capacity of an audience “as the efficient cause of the enactment of rhetoric as practical art,” p. 68–69.
45. Walzer, Exodus, 76.
46. David D. Hall, A Reforming People: Puritanism and the Transformation of Public Life in New England (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011), 157.
47. My account is obviously influenced by Judith Butler's discussion of iteration. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993), 94–95. See also John M. Sloop, Disciplining Gender: Rhetorics of Sex Identity in Contemporary US Culture (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2004).
48. Perry Miller, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (Boston: Beacon Press, 1939; 1961), 382.
49. Barack Obama, “A More Perfect Union” in Change We Can Believe In: Barack Obama's Plan To Renew America's Promise (New York: Crown Publishing, 2008), 215–16.
50. Obama, “Perfect Union,” 216.
51. Perry Miller, Errand Into The Wilderness (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1964), 68–69.
52. See the video at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1yq0tMYPDJQ.
53. Barack Obama, “New Hampshire Primary Night” in Change We Can Believe In, 211–12.
54. Obama, “New Hampshire Primary Night,” 212.
55. Rieder, 155.
56. Walzer, Exodus, 76.
57. It is important to note the dissociation in King's use of the creed. The “true” meaning of this nation's creed is implicitly contrasted to a “false” or “comfortable” meaning, one that does not allow for social change. The dissociation gives King's text its teeth. J. Robert Cox concurs with this view, perhaps seeing King's address as an example of what he elsewhere terms “critical memory.” See J. Robert Cox, “Memory, Critical Theory, and the Argument from History,” Argumentation & Advocacy 27 (1990): 1–13; Cox, “The Fulfillment of Time: King's ‘I Have a Dream’ Speech” in Texts in Context, 181–204. Robert Hariman and James Klumpp interpret the speech as significantly more constrained by existing norms. Robert Hariman, “Time and the Reconstitution of Gradualism in King's Address: A Response to Cox,” Texts in Context, 205–18; James F. Klumpp, “Burkean Social Hierarchy and the Ironic Investment of Martin Luther King,” in Kenneth Burke and the 21 st Century, ed. Bernard L. Brock (Albany: State University Press of New York, 1989): 191–206. See also Jasinski and Murphy, “Time, Space, and Generic Reconstitution.”
58. Walzer, Exodus, 97.
59. Bercovitch, Jeremiad, 10.
60. Bercovitch, Jeremiad, 12–13. See also, Jasinski and Murphy, “Time, Space, and Generic Reconstitution,” 110.
61. Obama, “New Hampshire Primary Night,” 212–13.
62. Obama, “New Hampshire Primary Night,” 211.
63. Walzer, 109.
64. Glaude, Jr., Exodus!, 5.
65. Bercovitch, Jeremiad, 13–14.
66. Bercovitch, Jeremiad, 24. Others concur that the need to emulate means also the need to surpass. See Ursula Brumm, American Thought and Religious Typology (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1970), 27; Werner Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 40–65.
67. Obama, “Perfect Union,” 220.
68. Obama, “Perfect Union,” 223–24.
69. Bercovitch, Jeremiad, 13.
70. Obama, “Perfect Union,” 227.
71. Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (New York: Three Rivers Press, 1995, 2004), 233–37.
72. Obama, “Perfect Union,” 230–31.
73. Obama, “Perfect Union,” 231.
74. Obama, “Perfect Union,” 232.
75. Frank, 187. See also Terrill; James T. Kloppenberg, Reading Obama: Dreams, Hope, and the American Political Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), 214.
76. Obama, “Perfect Union,” 232.
77. Walzer, Exodus, ix.
78. Walzer, Exodus, 17.
79. Walzer, Exodus, 149.
80. See Walzer, Exodus; Glaude, Jr., Exodus!; Brumm, American Thought; Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity; Selby, Martin Luther King; and, for a recent popular treatment, Bruce Feiler, America's Prophet: Moses and the American Story (New York: William Morrow, 2009). The section on the anti-Communism of The Ten Commandments is especially delicious.
81. Eddie S. Glaude, Jr. states bluntly, “Most efforts toward liberation in African American history have been articulated as reenactments of Israel's exodus from Egypt.” Exodus!, 4.
82. Howard-Pitney, The African American Jeremiad.
83. Bercovitch, Jeremiad, 179.
84. Murphy, “Jeremiad,” 404.
85. James Darsey, The Prophetic Tradition and Radical Rhetoric in America (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 29.
86. Bryon Garsten, Saving Persuasion: A Defense of Rhetoric and Judgment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 44. Roberts-Miller, Voices in the Wilderness, concurs with this view of the Puritans; Hall, A Reforming People, builds a persuasive case that the Puritans are a reforming people.
87. Butler, Bodies that Matter, 94–95.
88. Barack Obama, “Call to Renewal Keynote Address,” June 26, 2006. http://www.barackobama.com, 3.
89. For an account of Barack Obama's political philosophy that emphasizes his pragmatist (in the Deweyean sense) orientation, see Kloppenberg, Reading Obama; Jonathan Alter notes that Obama often identified Niebuhr as his “favorite philosopher.” See The Promise: President Obama, Year One (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2010), 226.
90. Richard J. Bernstein, The Abuse of Evil: The Corruption of Politics and Religion Since 9/11 (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2005), 16.
91. For a different view of Reagan and Obama, see Rowland and Jones, “Recasting the American Dream.”
92. Obama, The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2006), 362.