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Nomination acceptance addresses perform two major functions: They reconstitute the factions splintered by the primaries into a unified party and they frame the general election campaign as a clash between two narrative visions of America. In 2016, Donald Trump co-opted Republicans into his empire, conflated imagining and remembering to envision an American dystopia caused mainly by Clinton, claimed that he alone could fix things using unspecified mechanisms, and promised to provide an immediate American utopia. Clinton envisioned a cooperative nation with fewer recent successes than problems, explained that only together could we improve our prospects for a better future by working hard to enact unspecified policies, and warned us against making a bad man our potentate. Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton performed the rhetorical functions of consolidating support and framing the campaign but, to date, no rhetor has found a way to reconcile them into a unifying American vision.

Ted Windt's description of presidential crisis rhetoric helps explain the successes and the difficulties of President Bush's war on terror. Immediately after the attacks, the president moved rhetorically to provide reassurance and to delegate policy direction. But President Bush's rhetorical transformation of a faceless coward's attack on our country into evil's attack on everything good and proper in the world prepared us to respond against enemies beyond "those responsible for these attacks" even as his top advisors warned against doing so. The devil-angel melodrama provided the dramatistic proof Windt described, and when the president cast it in the form of a jeremiad, it reconciled contradictions and complicated counterargument and deliberation.

The 1996 campaign for president was never close. President Clinton's projected electoral votes never fell below the 271 he needed for re-election and Senator Dole peaked in March at 69 projected electoral votes. This essay uses two underutilized subnational data sets—the Hotline's "Electoral Scoreboards" and the Pew Center for the People and the Press's typology of American voters—to explain the apparent contradiction between Clinton's modest aggregate public approval ratings and his landslide re-election.

THE AUTHOR ASSESSES THE IMPORTANCE OF THE IOWA CAUCUSES AND THE SUPER TUESDAY PRIMARIES IN PRESIDENTIAL ELECTIONS. CONVENTIONAL WISDOM MAKES THE IOWA CAUCUSES A MAJOR PREDICTOR OF SUCCESS IN GAINING BOTH THE DEMOCRATIC AND REPUBLICAN NOMINATIONS AND CLAIMS THAT SUPER TUESDAY GIVES AN ADVANTAGE TO CONSERVATIVE DEMOCRATIC CANDIDATES. BUT THE FACTS ARE OTHERWISE, AND THE MYTHS ABOUT THE IOWA CAUCUSES AND SUPER TUESDAY PRIMARIES HAVE BEEN CREATED BY JOURNALISTS.

THE STUDY OF PRESIDENTIAL PRIORITIES IS THE STUDY OF PRESIDENTIAL PREFERENCES AND THEIR ADVOCACY. PRESIDENTS ADVANCE THEIR CONCEPTIONS OF THE PUBLIC GOOD, AND THEIR PREFERRED MEANS FOR IMPLEMENTING IT, IN THEIR PUBLIC UTTERANCES. WE CAN ANALYZE THAT RHETORIC BY EXAMINING THEIR LANGUAGE, THEIR STRATEGIES, THEIR DELIVERY, THEIR PROGRAMS, OR THEIR VALUES. VALUE ANALYSIS OF PRESIDENTIAL RHETORIC IS IMPORTANT FOR SEVERAL REASONS. FIRST, A VALUE IS AN ENDURING CRITERION FOR JUDGMENT WHICH TRANSCENDS INDIVIDUAL POLICIES. THE ANALYSIS OF VALUES ENABLES US TO FOCUS UPON THE YARDSTICKS BY WHICH PRESIDENTS WOULD HAVE US GAUGE THE PUBLIC GOOD AND HENCE THEIR PROGRAMS. IT PAVES THE WAY FOR CONSIDERATION OF THE PRESIDENT'S FIDELITY, HYPOCRISY, AND FLEXIBILITY. ADDITIONALLY, VALUE ANALYSIS ENABLES US TO CHART PRESIDENTIAL PRIORITIES SO THAT WE CAN BETTER UNDERSTAND THE DILEMMAS WHICH PERIODICALLY CONFRONT ANY PRESIDENT. FINALLY, VALUE ANALYSIS CAN ULTIMATELY HELP US TO UNDERSTAND THE EXTENT TO WHICH PRESIDENTS ADVOCATE THE SAME POLICIES ON THE BASIS OF DIFFERENT VALUES, DIFFERENT POLICIES FROM THE SAME VALUES, OR PARTICULAR POLICIES FROM PARTICULAR VALUES.