Force and Grace --- There are several rhetoric questions at the beginning: “What happens if…”. The Senator uses “we, Republicans” to present what Republicans should want. He provides questions and answers them, validating as true his own position and he does it in an aspirational way. He uses several metaphors: “Leadership knows where the buck stops”… An excellent one is when he says “as the alliances and agreements that ensure the stability of the entire world are routinely threatened by the level of thought that goes into 140 characters” and describes it as a “mercurial behavior”. By saying so, Senator Flake is qualifying the president’s intelligence and meaning that, with a mere tweeter, -and the president makes extensive use of those- he puts the country and the world in danger. Finally, through his speech, Senator Flake appeals to shared values, interacting with force and grace most of the time.

Source author: Blanca Jimenez bjimenez@sre.gob.mx