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flamingdem

(39,304 posts)
Sun Jun 28, 2015, 01:36 AM Jun 2015

Great analysis of Obama's eulogy rhetoric - from The Atlantic [View all]

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/06/grace/397064/

-- snip

Here are the three rhetorical aspects of the speech that I think made it more artful as a beginning-to-end composition than any of his other presentations:

— The choice of grace as the unifying theme, which by the standards of political speeches qualifies as a stroke of genius.

— The shifting registers in which Obama spoke—by which I mean “black” versus “white” modes of speech—and the accompanying deliberate shifts in shadings of the word we.

— The start-to-end framing of his remarks as religious, and explicitly Christian, and often African-American Christian, which allowed him to present political points in an unexpected way.

.. more at link
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