Rhetorical Analysis Of Barack Obama

Our nation is plagued with problems, and we look to one man to solve them all, president Barack Obama. He plans to solve these in his address to the United Nations General Assembly given on September 24, 2014 in New York City. President Obama gave this speech in response to major issues that were taking place at that time. Some of the issues he talked about were Ebola, which was a deadly disease running rampant through West Africa, the conflict in Ukraine having to do with Russia, and the issue of ISIL terrorist groups. Obama talks about all of these issues to bring up one major goal of this argument. The goal is for the international community to come together to sort out and overcome the problems. He tackles two questions in this argument, “whether the nations here today will be able to renew the purpose of the UN’s founding; and

The fear he brings on by talking about Ebola spreading, the grief brought on by talking of the many murders and awful acts by ISIL terrorists, to the hope he projects be calling for the nations to come together to drive his argument. While some arguments use emotion to deceive readers and keep them from paying attention to the argument, but Obama’s speech does just the opposite. The emotions that are felt bring you closer to his argument and facilitate understanding of what he is saying. Since unfortunately not a great deal of people pay attention to politics, they are not knowledgeable on the issues that have taken place. With the use of emotion, Obama is able to help those understand without them having to know the situation entirely. For example, regarding the ISIL terrorists, Obama states the, “mother, sisters, and daughters have been subjected to rape as a weapon of war. Innocent children have been gunned down.” Now while one may not know the ins and out of all the acts of ISIL, this makes people understand that they are bad and need to be