Ann Richards's Speech Summary

“We are one nation. We are the United States of America,” Ann Richards said during the Democratic convention of 1988. In the American society we constantly feel the need to become one, Richards uses this value that America holds so dearly as one way to create social cohesion with her audience. According to Johannesen, speakers should not seek to adopt new values or dismiss old values but simply revive existing values and in using these values you create “unity of the spirit”. As a society, after major disaster or event you hear the phase constantly being thrown around that “We are the United States of the America.” You hear the chant of patriotism and by Richards saying that we are one nation in her speech she is telling the public regardless

One missing piece of this puzzle is what it all means. Ann Richards begins her speech talking about her childhood and background. She uses this as a method to show the people that she is also an American that came through obstacles like everyone else. “I was born during the Depression in a little community just outside Waco, and I grew up listening to Franklin Roosevelt on the radio. Well, it was back then that I came to understand the small truths and the hardships that bind neighbors together”. As you can see in the first minutes of her speech she wants to establish that she knows the struggle of the common man. She shifts her approach of the speech in elusive way implying the ones that run the government now are not making America strive. She reads a letter she received from a mother from Texas saying. “We're the people you see every day in the grocery stores, and we obey the laws. We pay our taxes.” Richards by using this catches the audience attention, getting them to realize that regardless of how much work someone might put in it make not always be enough and the government is doing absolutely nothing to fix

She soon begins the real purpose of her speech to state that the Democratic Party is the way to go. “This Republican Administration treats us as if we were pieces of a puzzle that can’t fit together.” Richards use her keynote address as a way to persuade them to vote Democratic because the Republican Party does not see that everyone should be seen as equals who have the same opportunities. She wants the crowd to get fired up about the same issues that she is passionate about that constantly get ignored. “And we believe that America must have leaders who show us that our struggles amount to something and contribute to something larger -- leaders who want us to be all that we can be.” She wants to have a deep connection with her supporters. She is trying to show the candidates in the Democratic Party will create a better America and they are the ones that we should vote for. That the leaders of the opposing side are the ones that are making America decline. “Now, in contrast, the greatest nation of the free world has had a leader for eight straight years that has pretended that he cannot hear our questions over the noise of the helicopters. And we know he doesn’t wanna answer. But we have a lot of questions. And when we get our questions asked, or there is a leak, or an investigation the only answer we get is, "I don’t know," or "I forgot.” She is saying very cleverly who wants to be led by a president who is not truthful to