Rhetorical Analysis: A More Perfect Union

Barack Obama delivered a powerful speech before an audience at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia on March 18, 2008, in response to prior events involving some very controversial and insensitive anti-American comments from his former pastor and, until shortly before the speech was given, campaign participant, Jeremiah Wright. The speech was entitled “A More Perfect Union”, a phrase which he borrows from the preamble of the U.S. Constitution to remind his audience of the original values of America’s founding fathers and their goal to create an independent democratic nation, free of tyranny, i.e., a perfect union. Obama reveals that the long-lasting issue with that goal is that it was incomplete at the time and has yet to be reached

Yet, despite his condemnation of Reverend Wright’s controversial statements, Obama was still receiving many questions regarding his own knowledge of Wright’s political views prior to the situation and the candidacy in general. He effectively uses a parallel structure of sentences to address these questions all at once. Did he know Wright to be an occasionally fierce critic of American domestic and foreign policy? “Of course.” Did he ever hear Wright make controversial remarks while in church? “Yes.” But he explains how those views and remarks did not entirely define Jeremiah Wright as a person and that it is unfair to see them reflected through Obama himself and his political campaign. “Did I strongly disagree with many of his political views?” he asks. “Absolutely.” He addressed these questions before giving the audience the chance to actually ask him in person as a way to put ease to the “firestorm”, a metaphor he uses to describe the public outcry that his former pastor had single-handedly catalyzed. This choice in diction emphasizes the magnitude and severity of of the response to outrageous comments that Obama continues to dismiss as perverse ideologies that stemmed from a profoundly distorted view of the politics of

He reminds the audience that disparities that exist today in not only the African-American community, but the entire American community as a whole, can be traced back to the America’s long history of racial inequality and suffering that the early Americans enabled to exist, from the age of slavery even up to the mid-20th century. This was the time of Reverend Wright’s generation, “a time when segregation was still the law of the land and opportunity was systematically constricted.” The paradox of systematically constricted opportunity that Obama uses here supports his earlier point that the founding fathers’ original goal to create a free land of opportunity has always been tethered by their failure to recognize the fact that not everyone in the land is equally free and privileged. Many have ever since then been held back by the restraint of discrimination that tears away at the so-called “opportunities” that they have been granted. Obama says that it is remarkable, though, how many of them overcame the odds and “scratched and clawed their way to get a piece of the American dream,” and made a way out of no way for future generations. His choice