The 2012 United States presidential election pitted incumbent Democratic president, Barack Obama, and the republican nominee, former Governor, Mitt Romney against each other. This followed Obama’s first term in which his administration inherited the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. In both the commercial, “Determination,” and his final rally speech of election season, Barack Obama tries to convince the people that together, America can build on the improvements made in his first term. Former President Barack Obama’s superior usage of rhetoric, such as asyndeton and repetition, convinced the middle class that if voted over Mitt Romney, he would improve the economy significantly.
In the commercial “Determination,” Obama expands on the advancements his administration made that helped the struggling economy and the middle class. The advertisement uses the common folk technique by having all the people presented as blue-collar workers or part of the working class. By employing all the people in the commercial as a part of the middle class, Obama shows that
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Following the recession of 2008, many Americans fell into unemployment. Capitalizing on this problem, Obama makes most of his promises about the employment rate and jobs. To effectively communicate this, he repeats the phrase “Change is,” followed by various advancements made in his first term and promised for his second term. In addition, while he uses repetition, he increases his volume to increase the drama of the words. He uses the straw man fallacy when he misrepresents and oversimplifies the future that America will have under Mitt Romney. By boiling down everything Mitt Romney would potentially do as president into “back to the top-down policies that caused the mess we've been fighting our way out of for 4 years,” Obama paints a false picture of the