Obama and Old Fashioned Anti-politics Rhetoric

Abstract

Anti-political rhetoric was a feature of every political campaign of Obama’s career. He was like many predecessors who sketched a lurid anti-political portrait of current affairs as a prelude to promising a restoration of democracy. This feature worked in combination with claims to innocence of Washington ways as means of establishing ethos with voters. This rhetoric has origins in early eighteenth-century Britain from where it travelled first to America and then to Australia. These three countries share adversarial party systems and admonitory and hortatory rhetoric. There political discourses frequently include allegations of lies, corruption, and betrayal of the public interest. Accordingly, ad hominem accusations along such lines have potency because people generally are prepared to believe the worst of politicians and politics.