The Evolution of Candidate Bush

Abstract

This article examines George W. Bush’s campaign rhetoric in both 2000 and 2004 and compares his style to that of his predecessors. Using DICTION, a computerized language analysis program, the study finds that Bush was quite tentative during the 2000 campaign and eschewed use of a narrative style. By the time his reelection campaign began, however, Bush had dramatically increased his hortatory and narrative scores, meaning he had found both an important story to tell and a forceful way of telling it. Because these qualities increased steadily with time, and because they seem to have been initiated by the terrorist attacks of September 11, they signal important epistemological, sociological, psychological, and political aspects of the Bush presidency and perhaps, of the national electorate itself.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 35 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.