Abstract
A few days before the 2004 Democratic Convention opened, speech-writer and Democratic consultant Bob Shrum visited the mostly unknown keynote speaker for that convention’s second night. The speaker’s draft impressed Shrum who had been working on the acceptance speech for nominee John Kerry. ‘Here was a politician who could write’, he wrote later (Shrum, 2007: 461). There was a problem, though. Both the speaker and Kerry had one line which read exactly the same: ‘I see an America — red, white, and blue.’ Would the speaker, Shrum asked, let Kerry have it?
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© 2016 Robert Lehrman and Andrew S. Crines
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Lehrman, R., Crines, A.S. (2016). The Oratory of Barack Obama. In: Crines, A.S., Moon, D.S., Lehrman, R. (eds) Democratic Orators from JFK to Barack Obama. Rhetoric, Politics and Society. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137509031_13
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137509031_13
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Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-55818-6
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-50903-1
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