Everywhere people look, listen, and interact, there is an attempt to market them for one purpose or another; some are obvious, while others are harder to detect. Metaphors and analogies in political marketing help us understand complex topics in simpler terms. Meanwhile, specific familiar language shapes a pre-conditioned perspective in our minds of how we interpret an idea. In the rhetorical environment of politics during the 2008 presidential election, exaggerated ethical, logical, and emotional appeals whose purpose is to entice, deter, or convert a person’s view on a subject perturbed many good-willed Americans. By breaking down the individual parts of an advertisement it is discovered how they all relate back to each other to create an effective lure, or not. Rhetorical devices in the political advertisement “Judgement” effectively highlight the extremist behavior of Obama’s pastor and associate his radicalism with Obama’s judgement.
In “Judgement”, Barack Obama is framed as the emulation of a radical religious leader. The advertisement attacks
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Often misquoted and selectively edited, Wright’s sermon was taken out of context. A better idea can be understood of his intent when you learn a fuller version of the thought Wright preached that day: “that the United States, ‘government gives them [blacks] the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law and then wants us to sing ‘God Bless America.’ No, no, no, not God bless America, God damn America, that’s in the bible for killing innocent people, God damn America for treating our [black] citizens as less than human” (Walker, Smithers 13). When the voters see the full argument they understand the Reverend was using the language shaping terms (God damn America) and metaphors (US of KKK A) as attention-getters for sensitive social