Victory Speech Offer Close Readings of Presidential Essay

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Victory speech" offer close readings of presidential speeches given during times of crisis. Safire's essay analyzes Abraham Lincoln's "Gettysburg Address," which was delivered during a commemoration ceremony soon after one of the bloodiest battles of the Civil War. Wood's essay analyzes Barak Obama's victory speech after Obama won the presidency in 2008. Obama, the first African-American elected to the office of the presidency, took power during a time when America was at war and facing its deepest financial crisis since the Great Depression.

Safire analyzes the Gettysburg Address to encourage the reader reconsider the speech in a new way, given that the Address has become a kind of cliche, rather than a living, breathing document that inspires people. Safire notes the number of times the word 'dedicate' is articulated in the speech, and the determination and self-sacrifice called upon by Lincoln. He analyzes how the speech is broken down, paragraph by paragraph, to convey different types of meaning to the listener: the reinforcing of the equality and liberty of the ideals of America in the first two paragraphs, followed by the honoring of the dead in the third, fourth, and fifth.

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Safire argues that the unifying metaphor of the address is a religious one, because it is structured upon the idea of birth, death, and finally rebirth.

In contrast, Wood's essay analyzes Obama's speech more in terms of the phrases and images Obama uses, and the pictures painted in Obama's rhetoric. Like Safire, Wood clearly admires and approves of the speech he is analyzing. Wood notes how, in Obama's speech, there is also a unifying metaphor. The vast sweep of recent American history and survival is encompassed in one image, that of the hundred and six-year-old Ann Nixon Cooper, whose life spans the Great Depression, World War II, and the Civil Rights struggle and who finally was able to cast a vote in favor of an African-American president, despite African-Americans being denied the right to vote for so long. Safire's idea of religious, rather than secular and civic death and….....

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