Submitted by william hanks, Mar 23, 2008 16:01

As a longtime student of rhetoric, to me Obama's appeal is not based on logic or facts, but on gross abstractions: change, working together, uniting, a new beginning, etc. These are the pieties of shameless sophistry, and apparently they have great appeal. I recall Hamlet's speech to the players regarding dumb-shows and noise: "This, though it make the unskillful laugh, can but make the judicious grieve, the censure of the which, one in your allowance must outweigh a whole theatre of others." Obama's rhetoric wouldn't pass muster in an academic debate where there are standards. A pity that in the public realm there are few, if any, standards. The only element of classical rhetoric that appears in Obama speeches is style. Well, it works in advertising, but it's a shabby way to meaure a prospective president.

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