Analyzing John Kerry's Speech

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Analyzing John Kerry's speech "Fighting a Comprehensive War on Terrorism"

John Kerry speech, “Fighting a Comprehensive War on Terrorism”, may be seen as an art of his campaign for the forthcoming elections in the country. Apart from arguing on his point of view regarding war on terrorism by Bush Administration, one can see good use of speech techniques displayed throughout the text to convey his message to the audience. Kerry uses all sorts of speech techniques like “name calling”, “appeal to fear”, “faulty cause and effect”, and “glory by association”, to portray his own version of President Bush’s image in front of audience and supported his ideas with persuasiveness.
While analyzing his speech from the point of view of many language techniques, we can see that he could not refrain himself from using “name calling”, a device consisting of labeling people or ideas with bad names. For instance, he calls President Bush a “War President” by saying: “Day in and day out, George W. Bush reminds us that he is a war President…” Onward, he calls Bush and his close associates “hawks”, in the words of “...What George Bush and his armchair hawks have never understood is that our military is about more than moving pins on a map or buying expensive new weapons systems.” Kerry’s “name calling” of Bush and his associates right away makes us look at them in a different way. Since “war” is associated with something scary and horrible, giving Bush a name of a “war President” is the same thing as saying that Bush is a scary and a horrible person. It’s almost making us think that Bush caused the war in the first place. Kerry calls Bush’s associated “hawks”, which are looked upon as dark cruel animals that don’t care about anything but their own well being. That connection makes Bush’s associates seem to be cruel and heartless people with no good cause.
Throughout the speech ...