Publications

This paper examines the state of public address in 2020 under Donald Trump’s administration. The study examines two key inflection points (the bleach press conference and BLM protests in Lafayette Square park) to argue that public address is under threat from multiple failures in the liberal public sphere. Media, experts, politicians, and citizen failures marked all three controversies and reveal that Trump’s greatest threat may be to our conception of public discourse and the institutions that are designed to safeguard it.

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This paper examines the eulogies that President Obama gave for mass shooting victims across multiple years of his administration. A gifted and talented crafter of national eulogies, Obama utilized multiple forms of local symbols to ground arguments for policy change. Deploying scenes, sites, communities, and institutions, Obama refracted the lives of the victims through those local places to display for audiences the impact of mass shooting on local places. Values oriented around family, work, faith, and patriotism provide the grounds for Obama’s policy argument that gun safety reform is necessary to stem the tide of gun violence in America.

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This paper argues that Romney’s attempts to utilize an argumentative structure around the Benghazi controversy failed to achieve his preferred outcomes in the second debate of the 2012 presidential election. In the project, I detail how Romney successfully deployed a strategic maneuver, the ideological enthymeme, in the first debate in Denver, but when applied to a subject matter like the Benghazi inquiry, the strategy fails. On issues like health care, multiple audiences have a variety of perspectives on the issue, so argumentative triangulation is more likely to succeed in public debates. On controversies like Benghazi where audiences are primarily split between two static camps of believers and non-believers, the ideological enthymeme fails to resonate with potential persuadable viewers.

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This paper argues that surface-level analysis of political argument fails to explain the effectiveness of ideological enthymemes, particularly within the context of presidential debates. This paper uses the first Presidential debate of the 2012 election as a case study for the use of “Obamacare” as an ideological enthymeme. The choice of a terminological system limits and shapes the argumentative choices afforded to the candidate. Presidential debates provide a unique context within which to examine the interaction of ideological constraints and argument due to their relatively committed and ideologically homogenous audiences.

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Prasch, A. M. (2023). The World Is Our Stage: The Global Rhetorical Presidency and the Cold War. University of Chicago Press.

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Anderson, K. R., Carwell, D. H., Dudash-Buskirk, E. A., Edwards, J. A., Testa, P. F., Frederick, R. G., ... & Wehrle, E. (2015). The bully pulpit, presidential speeches, and the shaping of public policy. Lexington Books.

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