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relationship to audiences and purposes. Too often we think of purpose as something
possessed only by speakers…; audiences, too, have purposes, and it is the process of
adjusting the purposes of the speaker to those of the audience that we call rhetoric.”
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Consequently, a rhetorical context “is the unique array of forces—rhetorical, historical,
sociological, psychological, strategic, economic, and personal—that exists at any given
moment in time and that impacts the speaker’s selection and presentation of topics, the
ways in which the message is composed and treated, and the manner in which the
audience is invited to experience and understand the discourse.” (ibid) Let me suggest,
without fully elaborating here, that the president’s not calling for public sacrifice was a
strategic decision. A rhetorical situation is frequently marked by multiple exigencies; for
President Bush, the demands of the rhetorical situation were constrained by the limits of
political acceptance from the American public. President Bush’s motives for war invoked
enduring metaphors and a structure presidents have relied on from the inception of the
republic, but the limits of war metaphors and the performance of the victimage ritual
might be found in the dynamic interplay between the president and an audience with its
own value preferences and expectations.
Further examination of the public’s expectations about America’s place in the
world and the modalities of its response to such exigences as the war on terror in the
wake of the 9/11 attacks is necessary, but the administration neither received nor sought
a mandate to move the public beyond its wariness of intractable conflicts, significant
American casualties, and nation-building that previous administrations have had (with
only mixed success) to grapple with (Cole, 1999; 1996) The vast change in the post-
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Medhurst argues (1996: xv) that to “reduce rhetoric to a linear, one-to-one, cause-effect relation between
the message (cause) and audience reaction (effect) is to fundamentally misunderstand the nature of the art.”
Convention