State Of The Union Address Rhetorical Analysis

Effective leaders have their credibility challenged from time-to-time. The degrees to which leaders exhibit the ability to be honest, inspiring, forward-looking, and competent gives someone credibility. Each person’s approach is different, and some methods that work for one, do not work for another. Watching the President’s State of the Union address and the Republican rebuttal speech by Senator Ernst showed two different approaches to establishing credibility. One leader’s method was effective, while the other’s method did not work as well.
The President opened with a storytelling, a style that is known as “Begin in the middle.” He used hypothetical people to create scenes - to lend authenticity to his claim of an improved economy - while
She is drawing on the economic hurt of the nation to gain our trust and to build confidence in her vision for our country. At this point, her demeanor lightens up, she smiles a bit drawing the audience in, trying to get them to see her vision. She tries to get the audience excited by saying how the new Republican majority you elected, would reform Congress and make it function once again. She focuses on what is not working for Americans and brings forward ideas of what needs to be changed. She talks about creating thousands of jobs and pumping billions of dollars into the economy with the Keystone Bill. She talks of tax reform with lower tax rates in opposition to the President’s reform that is focused on closing loopholes for the super wealthy. To inspire the audience, she uses the terms common sense and common ground to pull the nation together to work toward a common goal. She uses talk of reform of Washington and reform of taxes as a shared beliefs and values, trying to identify common goals that we all can agree on. This belief in a common goal shows that you are motivated by a desire to find a bipartisan answer to our problems. This motivation is designed to inspire the