Obama: The Narrative of a Man of the People for New Politics

Abstract

This chapter explores Obama’s successful construction of ethos in 2008 as a political outsider who could be trusted with power. He invoked Lincoln, King, and Kennedy as part of his jeremiad but also technology as part of his narrative and his ethos in order to acclaim the return of power to the grassroots. He was tilling 20 years’ worth of participatory political language that had grown around the internet. Yet his campaign involved an attenuated vision of political participation that was geared towards the election of a representative. Obama perfected his rhetoric through years of practice and repetition, like many accomplished political rhetors, and reinvented the traditional American campaign biography through digital means. There is a narrative and thematic recurrence to these biographies.