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This essay spotlights some of the ways that the 2020 presidential campaign reified the sexism and racism baked into American politics. To demonstrate her suitability as Joe Biden’s running mate, vi...

This essay examines the rhetorical identities of Hillary Clinton’s two political memoirs—Living History and Hard Choices. The first spanned her childhood through her years as first lady. The second recounted her tenure as secretary of state. Though both memoirs were written with a past orientation, they also sought to keep alive a future run for the presidency. Situating the two Clinton memoirs in the history of biography, we employ corpus rhetorical methods from the digital humanities to establish that Hard Choices featured a policy wonk identity compared to Living History’s more personal storyteller identity. This result is not surprising in light of the different segments of life each memoir covered. Adding surprise and insight is the discovery that both memoirs also feature additional Clinton identities that shed light on her strategies for a future presidential run and revealed the identity problems she faced as a woman vying for the presidency.

Drawing on the literature on American nationalism and the social identity perspective, this study examines the effects of mediasport on nationalized attitudes, using both rhetorical and experimental approaches. First, a rhetorical analysis examined the nationalistic themes featured in the game promotional ad of the United States versus Ghana soccer match in World Cup 2014, linking these themes to the republicanism/liberalism paradox in American political thought. Using the social identity perspective, we predicted the effects of these themes on U.S. participants’ nationalized attitudes and tested our hypotheses using an experiment. Experimental findings indicate that exposure to nationalistic rhetoric indirectly increases uncritical patriotism, critical patriotism, and support of militarism attitudes via self-enhancement gratifications. Additionally, exposure to nationalistic rhetoric also indirectly influences uncritical patriotism via social uncertainty reduction gratifications. Our study demonstrates the utility of a mixed-method approach and points out directions for future research on the (re)construction of social identities through mediasport.

This response to Kathleen Hall Jamieson's “The Discipline's Debate Contributions” brings forth, via a sampling of existing literature, those research trajectories about political debates ignored or minimized by Professor Jamieson as those trajectories hold true to the values and traditions of the Communication discipline and as they operate alongside the literature she surveys about debate effects. In particular, we suggest that political debates provide fascinating material for a range of rhetorical analyses that examine (1) the production and creation of political debates as rhetorical/political artifacts; (2) the language and arguments put forth in these events; and (3) the circulation of political debates as rhetorical texts in and through U.S. political culture. In so doing, we resist the hegemony of Professor Jamieson's “effects” approach to political debates both as that hegemony demarcates research about political debates and as it describes the limits and scope of Communication research generally.

This chapter represents the first installment of Hillary Clinton's news biography and examines the news coverage of Clinton during the 1992 presidential campaign and her entrance onto the national stage of politics. It recounts the baseline news frames that laid the foundation for judgments of Clinton's authenticity against which future frames would converge and diverge. The chapter also describes her most formative media moments during this period, which linguistically and visually acted as stock frames that authenticated Clinton as a feminist and inauthenticated her as a woman of tradition. Her political image was thus framed as a political intruder violating the protocol of presidential campaigning; an anomalous candidate's wife rejecting the trappings of home and domesticity in favor of feminist principles; and a political lightning rod who exuded personality problems that promised to disrupt her husband's presidential bid and undermine the traditions of first lady.

This chapter examines Hillary Clinton's leadership during the congressional health care debate and the investigations surrounding Whitewater—an era of her news biography marked with subterfuge and deceit. The overarching message communicated by the press was that during the health care debate, she once again talked too much and exerted too much control over her husband and his administration. Contrastingly, Clinton's unwillingness to talk enough served as evidence of her illegal wrongdoing during the Whitewater investigations. During both controversies, Clinton was pictured as smiling through the tumult, promulgating a sense of discordance between the seriousness of the allegations and her public comportment. She would consequently be disciplined through a rhetoric of violence for her outspokenness and her spatial violations as she was punished for such political and legal impropriety, corroding, once again, idyllic notions of authentic womanhood.

This chapter features the extensive television news coverage of Hillary Clinton as a candidate for the U.S. Senate. In many ways, the news broadcasts reflected the memory frames that circulated throughout her time as first lady, from her image as a political lightning rod who suffered from personality problems to that of a victimized wife. Questions surrounding her political authenticity were central to the news frames from the early murmurs of a possible Clinton Senate run. Clinton was correspondingly depicted as an inauthentic political candidate because of her questionable motives for office, her lack of geographical ties to the state of New York, her lack of political experience, and her shifting views on contentious political topics. These inauthenticity judgments suggested to the press and Clinton's Republican opponents that she lacked an overall fitness and preparedness for elective office.

This essay discusses the competing rhetorical styles of two volumes that appeared in the 1880s to remember Abraham Lincoln. One volume, edited by Alan Thorndike Rice, remembered Lincoln in a refined-official style. A second volume, by William Herndon and Jesse Weik, captured Lincoln in a middling-vernacular style. Using automatic coding and close reading, the authors show that Herndon-Weik’s middling-vernacular style put a focus on the “personal” Lincoln. Rice’s essayists, instead, featured an “official” Lincoln set apart from the everyday man. The authors argue that these contrasts were a contributing factor to the different critical reception they received.

Voice-overs with muted images, often known as the “image bite,” have become an increasingly used but understudied format of political language by the television news media. Because the media can use images to fit many contexts and purposes of commentary, the media images are susceptible to continuous de-contextualization and re-contextualization. Drawing from theories of feminist critical discourse analysis and gender performance as well as scholarship on the public/private divide, we examine the commentary of one U.S. television news organization’s (NBC) re-contextualization of the same stock footage of Hillary Clinton over 10 newscasts spanning 20 months from August 1998 to June of 2000. NBC re-enforces the public/private binary in conventional masculine terms. Yet it also worked, at times, to unify the binary when covering Hillary Clinton’s U.S. Senate campaign; on those occasions at least, NBC revealed the potential erosion of gender stereotypes and a small but still significant role for human agency in the study of gender ideology.

A new and highly efficient method for determining relative carboxyl group distribution in carboxyl-terminated polybutadiene has been developed using practical synthetic and analytical techniques. Using oxalyl chloride, samples of carboxyl-terminated polybutadiene were rapidly transformed to acid chlorides that were then chemically derivatized with benzyl alcohol, 4-nitrobenzyl alcohol, and 3,5-dinitrobenzyl alcohol. This provided quick and quantitative conversion to the corresponding benzyl ester derivatives. Each new derivative was fully characterized by nuclear magnetic resonance and Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy. The benzyl ester modified polymers were investigated in detail to determine their relative carboxyl group concentrations. To do this, gel permeation chromatography combined with ultra violet/refractive index dual detection was employed. The 4-nitrobenzyl ester, having the highest extinction factor at 270 nm provided the best UV data for analysis. The ultra violet/refractive index data of four separate polymer samples were plotted as a function of molecular weight. The data were compared with a theoretical plot (carboxyl group = two for all molecular weights) to illustrate the relative carboxyl concentration over the entire molecular weight range. Supplemental characterization of the 4-nitrobenzyl modified polymer was carried out using matrix-assisted laser desorption ionization coupled with time of flight mass spectrometry. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Appl Polym Sci, 2011