Reinventing America: Stories from the Presidency

«If you give me your vote - we won’t just win the election - together we will change the country and change the world« pledged Barack Obama during his 2008 presidential campaign. A promise and a statement of confidence in America’s ability to reinvent itself, which he has recently repeated in his 2011 State of the Union Address – «That's what Americans have done for over 200 years: reinvented ourselves». Obama’s election to the US presidency has already been heralded as a sign of change and the symptom of national renovation. His personality has been defined with multiple descriptions pinpointing aspects of his composite, new identity: e.g., Obama, the hyphenated man (Song 2009); the many-voiced man (Smith 2009); the re-framer (Conoscenti 2010); the man with an unfinished identity (Renshon 2008), and with a «liquid» identity (Gisotti 2010). Despite the specific features of his personality, the novelty of his election, and the innovative elements of his campaign, the rhetorical dawnism of Obama’s political discourse is not new: it is a recurrent element in Presidential rhetoric. By examining a corpus of presidential speeches, this study will highlight the recurrent themes in the national narrative of «Rebuilding America», showing that any reinvention of the country is basically a reinvention of its presidency.