A man for the people

A man for the people On September 5th, 2012 at the Democratic National Convention, in Charlotte, North Carolina, with the crowd roaring and TV commentators gushing, Bill Clinton’s speech, for the nomination of Barack Obama for another term in office, garnered so much attention as well as a great deal of criticism. Some denounced his speech as being too long, others branded it as a “fact-checkers nightmare,” but supporters dubbed it as “vintage” and even nicknamed him “Explainer-In-Chief.” However, if we are to check our partisan preferences at the door and grade his speech it is obvious that Bill Clinton’s speech is a brilliant political theatre. His speech made a strong case for the nomination and election of President Obama that was more compelling than any of the speakers including the case made by the incumbent president himself. It was the speech that President Obama couldn’t give but desperately needed. This political speech alone reveals that Mr. Clinton is gifted with supreme human connection hence earning him another nickname “Bubba”, especially in southern US. There are several rhetorical weapons that he uses from his arsenal to make a strong case and two of the most effective were repetition and humor. In this paper we will shed light on how he uses repetition and humor to convince his audience that Obama deserved another political term in the White House.
Clinton’s political speech is pregnant with repetition to make a strong case for the nomination of President Obama. In the early parts of his speech he mentions:

I want to nominate a man whose own life has known its fair share of adversity and uncertainty. I want to nominate a man who ran for president to change the course of an already weak economy and then just six weeks before his election, saw it suffer the biggest collapse since the Great Depression; a man who stopped the slide into depression and put us on the long road to recovery, knowing all the while that no matter how many jobs