The Roots and Form of Obama's Rhetorical Pragmatism

Abstract

Journalists and political pundits have described Barack Obama's beliefs and political style with the label pragmatism. This essay answers the following questions: What is the meaning of this label? What specific strands of the pragmatist tradition resonate through Obama's presidency? What effect does the label have on Obama's rhetorical practices? To answer these questions, this essay argues that Obama's rhetoric extends Jane Addams's political philosophy and Alain Locke's philosophy of race and that Addams and Locke are important resources for understanding Obama's pragmatism. Moreover, Obama develops a rhetorical pragmatism embodied in the form and style of his speeches.

Notes

1I thank RR peer reviewers Steven Mailloux and Jeremy Engels for their helpful comments and criticisms on early drafts of this manuscript. This essay was substantially improved because of their efforts.

2See Kloppenberg; Bohan; Hayes; Harshaw; Berkowitz. These are just five sources that take Obama's pragmatism as a major theme. A myriad of popular news sources have labeled Obama a pragmatist in passing reference as well.

3William Keith demonstrates the impact of Dewey's work on Speech Communication departments and the teaching of “discussion” for the purposes of citizenship (see Keith).

4Several recent public articles have attempted to explain Obama's success as rhetor and policy-maker: Zadie Smith, “Speaking in Tongues,” New York Review of Books, February 26, 2009; George Lakoff, “The Obama Code,” Huffington Post, February 24, 2009; and Jonathan Chait, “The Obama Method,” The New Republic, July 1, 2009.

5Robert Terrill, for example, relates Obama's rhetorical style to W. E. B. Du Bois but does not link that style to the pragmatist tradition. Robert Rowland and John Johnson critically interpret Obama's 2004 DNC speech but fail to identify the links between that speech and the pragmatist tradition.

6Addams claimed that “every student of [her] time had become more or less a disciple of pragmatism and its great teachers in the United States” (322). Dewey also often remarked on the extent to which Addams infuenced the development of his philosophy. And several biographers of Addams have demonstrated the extent to which pragmatism lie at the heart of Addams's endeavors.

7Twenty Years at Hull-House eloquently attests to this plurality by describing the connections between Polish, Greek, and Italian immigrant communities and showing how Addams's choice of where to place Hull-House geographically was determined by the physical intersections of these cultures.

8All of Obama's speeches that I reference were accessed at, Barack Obama, “The Complete Text Transcripts of over 100 of Barack Obama's Speeches,” http://obamaspeeches.com/ (accessed between May 1, 2009–June 10, 2009).

9See video of Ganz's explanation of this speech: http://campobama.blogspot.com/2007/09/4audio-marshall-ganz-explains.html