The Rhetorical Construction of a President

Abstract

This paper proposes that the most relevant contextualization of President George Bush's Inaugural Speech of January 1989 is to view the address as a restoration of ideological normality, which is to say invisibility, in American public discourse: the President acts to re-cover (in many senses) the common values and concerns of `the nation'. We particularly delineate how the language (text- and sentence-structurings, metaphors, etc.) of the address works to construct both the privileged public figure of the President, and a spirit of collective identity and consent for the audience, while still espousing particular political assumptions and goals (conservatism, quietism and a representation of the presidential role as that of politically detached steward of a gendered status quo rather than agent of change).