viz.

Briefly: I appreciate your point that the distinction between persuasion and manipulation is slippery. But I think it's helpful to maintain, however fictional, a distinction between ethically legitimate and ethically illegitimate means of persuasion (and this is what I try to get at in my teaching when I distinguish between between persuasion and manipulation). In my opinion, just because persuasion works to "change" something doesn't mean it's inherently manipulative, a word that, for me, has negative connotations. It's "how" change is brought about, as well as why, that I emphasize. In my analysis, I find Obama's rhetorical strategies ethically inadequate or illegitimate--disingenuous at worst and self-contradictory at best.

And I think it's worth pointing out that you relegate one of my central points, about excluded histories, which is one of the strongest reasons I personally feel alienated, to a passing aside in parentheses. (Although actually, so do I, so no fault there.) It's certainly a mark of the success of Obama's rhetoric, and his deployment of the ingroup/outgroup strategy, that you can do that. "Oh, sure, he leaves stuff out, but still...." It's the "but still" that (rather unapologetically) I think deserves more critical attention. And by no means do I mean that this attention means not voting for Obama. (I sometimes get the feeling, though not from you, Jillian, that many Obama supporters cannot conceive that one might both want to vote for him and criticize him...)