Political Speech: A More Perfect Union By Barack Obama
The political speech “A More Perfect Union” presented in Philadelphia by Barack Obama, discusses the issue of race as it has played a major role historically in the United States. He addresses the Reverend Wright argument and touches upon his own experiences as a black man. Obama’s objective was to persuade Americans to eliminate racial division for the good of all Americans. To obtain the interest of the audience, his speech consisted of rhetorical strategies. These strategies were emotional, ethical, and logical fallacies. To start off with, fallacies are errors in thinking or reasoning. According to Robert Gula, “it applies to conclusions that appear sound that are often convincing but are, in fact, incorrect.” As an example, Obama demonstrates
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This type of fallacy is common when “the author directly attacks someone’s character rather than focusing on the issue at hand, suggesting that because something is ‘wrong’ with this person, whatever he says must also be wrong.” However, Obama confronts the claim that his Reverend Wright is a man with backward views and statements. Although Obama admits that his pastor’s words were “incendiary,” he asserts that the general media who made the insulting claims about Wright and Obama’s still committed to the same church was simply out of self-interest. He lectured that it is easier to judge and critize only knowing one aspect of Wright. Obama then implies that the statements regarding Wright have no connection. Towards the end of the speech, Obama concludes that illegal immigrants have tuberculosis and leprosy. However this statement is not supported by evidence, it is used to scare the audience by associating the undocumented population with diseases. His statement, “all Mexicans are lepers” is a fallacy of hasty generalization and scare tactics. Hasty generalization refers to as “the drawing of a conclusion based on a small sample size, rather than looking at statistics that are much more in line with the typical or average
This type of fallacy is common when “the author directly attacks someone’s character rather than focusing on the issue at hand, suggesting that because something is ‘wrong’ with this person, whatever he says must also be wrong.” However, Obama confronts the claim that his Reverend Wright is a man with backward views and statements. Although Obama admits that his pastor’s words were “incendiary,” he asserts that the general media who made the insulting claims about Wright and Obama’s still committed to the same church was simply out of self-interest. He lectured that it is easier to judge and critize only knowing one aspect of Wright. Obama then implies that the statements regarding Wright have no connection. Towards the end of the speech, Obama concludes that illegal immigrants have tuberculosis and leprosy. However this statement is not supported by evidence, it is used to scare the audience by associating the undocumented population with diseases. His statement, “all Mexicans are lepers” is a fallacy of hasty generalization and scare tactics. Hasty generalization refers to as “the drawing of a conclusion based on a small sample size, rather than looking at statistics that are much more in line with the typical or average