Bill Clinton and the Oklahoma Memorial Service Speech Research Paper

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Clinton’s Speech

The Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 at the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in which more than 150 people lost their lives served as the occasion for William Jefferson Clinton’s speech at the Oklahoma Bombing Memorial Prayer Service Address. Although it is a prayer service address, Clinton never once mentions the word prayer in his speech. Instead he attempts to cheaply inspire the audience by using the tragedy of the bombing as an occasion to talk about a community coming together, how great America is, and how important it is for the legacy of the lost to be lived out in the lives of the living. Full of platitudes by light on actual sentiment, the speech fails to rise above its mawkish pretensions and deliver a satisfying response to the tragedy that had occurred in Oklahoma City just four days prior.

The speech is organized poorly. It begins by acknowledging the audience, the people of Oklahoma City, but quickly wanders off course as though the President were there to talk about how great the state of Oklahoma was and how many fond memories Bill and Hillary had of the place. Clinton even states that he is “honored to be here today to represent the American people” as though by giving the speech at the prayer service he were somehow being recognized for an accomplishment (Clinton 1). The speech gets back on topic in the next section, where Clinton discusses mourning with the victims’ families in the city, but he attempts to collectivize the victims by identifying those who were killed not as individual families but as one large American family—as though himself personally had lost loved ones in the blast.

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It is as though he is trying to sound like John F. Kennedy in 1963 in Berlin: “Ich bin ein Berliner” (Kennedy). As Michael McGee notes, the purpose of collectivization as a rhetorical device is to identify the “we the people” moment (235)—and for Clinton he does that in his address when he states that “this terrible sin took the lives of our American family” (Clinton 1). Clinton’s style is wordy, with endless qualifiers used to give the speech length. The delivery is dull and uninspired, saccharine at best. Christopher Hood notes that such a type of speech is useful in managing public sentiment and stifling any dissent that might be brewing among the public—and Clinton certainly manages to do that: by saying nothing of substance, he utterly evacuates the tragedy of any significance whatsoever, compelling the masses at large to go back to sleep—they have missed nothing.

Though Clinton succeeds in condescendingly painting a picture of how Americans can get over the tragic loss suffered four days prior in Oklahoma by planting a tree to remember the children, the sentimental nature of this success does not do much to indicate any real leadership on his part. In times of suffering, sentimentality is more like vinegar poured on a wound than it….....

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