Analyse af Barack Obamas tale 'A More Perfect Union'

“A More Perfect Union” is a political speech that focuses on race relations in the US by the former presidential candidate and senator Barack Hussein Obama on March 18, 2008, who is an American attorney and politician, who served as the 44th president of the United States. The speech was a response to the controversial comments about race segregation in America made by his former pastor Jeremiah Wright. The speech acknowledges Obama’s personal history as a man of color, living in the United States and embolden the nation to end the racial division, to overlook all the issues and unite to assemble A More Perfect Union.

The speech “A More Perfect Union” by Barack Obama mostly relies on rhetorical devices like allusion and enumeration. It also relies on other relevant rhetorical devices like the analogy, direct address, figurative speech, parallelism, repetitions, and rhetorical questions.

Obama applies to numerous allusions to attribute past and present historical events, literature, etc. to make federation with the topic of his speech. One of the examples is at the beginning of the speech taken from the Constitutional Convention was held and the US Constitution in 1787 “We the people, in order to form a more perfect union” which gives the speech more power, the speaker then continues with another allusion “Two hundred and twenty-one years ago” which is an allusion to Martin Luther King’s speech “I Have A Dream”: “Five score years ago”