Ronald Reagan: A Time for Choosing

Michael Thompson

September 8, 2012

Honors English IV

Danehower

Ronald Reagan: A Time for Choosing

            In this speech, Ronald Reagan gives his main argument which is that the American people have a time to choose in the upcoming election and he gives arguments on why the American people should choose him. The subject of his speech is to reach out to voters and make him known. He wants the audience to know his stands and that of his opponent’s stands and the contrasts in them. But with these contrasts he wants the American people to know that he is the better pick. He accomplishes this by giving all sorts of statistics and allusions.

            The audience is of course the American people. Reagan wants to influence eligible voters and voters alike. He wants them to play their role in voting for him. One of the ways he empowers the voters to vote for him is by telling the audience that there needs to be no left or right, but rather an up and a down; the up being “man’s old aged dream of individual freedom consistent with law and order” and the down being the “ant heap of totalitarianism”.

            Reagan’s persona in the matter of this speech is that he is a revered individual with hopes and dreams for the nation. He portrays himself as not only a possible president but the president himself. And also he gives points that he has not been given a script and is allowed to use his own ideas which to me represents the freedom that every American should be allotted.

            Reagan’s tone in this speech is serious and influential. He wants the audience to understand his viewpoints and how he feels about his ideas. He believes that his ideas are what will keep the country going and that these beliefs must be expressed to the audiences in the hopes of being understood. For the audience he gives them examples of how government interference hurts Americans and also allusions to past times such as the revolution and how the founding fathers did not want a big government.

            Reagan’s structure of his speech is phenomenal. In the introduction he, of course, introduces himself and his ideas. Throughout the body of his speech he has a logical flow of each of these ideas. He gives his thoughts on an issue, then gives the opponents but at the end of the dialogue he always asks the audience a question that really makes them think and think more in his favor. His conclusion is excellent as well for he gives allusions to past events that really incite the audience to look at him as almost a fatherly figure. He gives them allusions to the bible, as well as to the American Revolution and tells them that “we will preserve our children in this, the last best hope of a man on earth”.

           

            As for Reagan’s supporting material he gives a bountiful of statistics and examples. His given statistics show to the audience that the old ways aren’t working that we are increasing in millions of dollars of debt every day and that we have one and a half times the debt of all of the debt in all of the countries worldwide. He states that we are the last grain of freedom on the face of this earth by giving a story between him and two friends about a Cuban who escaped from Castro and to America and said that no other country offers freedom like that of the United States.

            Last, but not least Reagan also had an amazing amount of strategies. His language was used appropriately in all areas from being uprising towards his ideas and derogatory of the opponent’s ideas. In this article I saw a lot of a fortiori and allusions being used.  One example of a fortiori being used was that towards the War on Poverty. He gives the audience statistics on the money being poured into the system to help with this “war” and says “Now do they honestly expect us to believe that if we add 1 billion dollars to the 45 billion we're spending, one more program to the 30-odd we have -- and remember, this new program doesn't replace any, it just duplicates existing programs -- do they believe that poverty is suddenly going to disappear by magic?” this is the perfect example of a fortiori because if it happens in one case, it’s going to happen in others. Also with the allusion aspect of the strategies used, Reagan used a lot of American Revolution examples. He gave the allusion that big government is something that the Founding Fathers were avoiding and also gave this statement “This is the issue of this election: whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capitol can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves”. This statement is the perfect allusion to the 13 colonies under the British rule and having no representation in parliament during that time.