Barry, Bernie, & Hillary: Hope as a Staple of Liberal Discourse

Abstract

This study analyzes mainstream liberal political discourse, specifically from Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Bernie Sanders, to code for the usage of specific hopeful rhetorical styles that were used principally by Barack Obama in 2008 to assess if there was an increase in Hillary Clinton’s usage of these rhetorical strategies between 2008 and 2016. I studied this discourse shift using rhetorical analysis to code for instances of these hopeful rhetorical styles. By studying this, I intend to show that Hillary Clinton changed her rhetoric between these election cycles because it was successful for her challengers in the primary season. I also studied how gendered notions of political speech harmed her. To study this, I did a word count of each speech to see if Hillary Clinton, following the theory that female politicians are often derided for long speeches, had shorter speeches than her male counterparts.

Keywords: Democratic Party, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Bernie Sanders, Rhetoric, Hope, Change