Barack Obama’s identity-building in the health care debate: A corpus-assisted discourse study

In this study, I demonstrate that identity-building is an important discursive strategy for President Barack Obama in the seven-year long debate surrounding the Affordable Care Act (ACA). The data for the study comes from a 6-million word corpus of speeches that were held by Obama between January 2009 and January 2016, all published by the White House. The speeches are classified according to genre, audience, topic and date of delivery. Throughout the paper, I adopt the notion that identity is intentionally constructed by the speaker and strategically exploited for his communicative goals. With the help of two methodological approaches, I investigate what kind of identities Obama builds. The purely qualitative part of the study deals with three central corpus speeches from a discourse-analytic perspective. In the second, more quantitative part, I use a group of seven verbs with epistemic meaning to trace the usage of two predominant discursive identities in the ACA debate. The results suggest that President Obama repeatedly constructs the identities of father and teacher to persuade his audience. I argue that his use of these identities constitutes an attempt to reach the argumentative goals of effectiveness and reasonableness