Obama's “New Beginning”: Us Foreign Policy and Comic Exceptionalism

Abstract

Many praised Barack Obama's speech at Cairo University in June 2009 for marking a break with the Bush administration's post-9/11 foreign policy, but others saw it as a dangerous apology for American exceptionalism. We argue that in the speech Obama broke with previous notions of American exceptionalism exhibiting a variant we call comic exceptionalism. Comic exceptionalism is defined by reflexivity, agonism, and the pursuit of common ground. In addition to explaining Burke's frames of acceptance and how comic exceptionalism is unique from other forms of American exceptionalism, we show how Obama enacted comic exceptionalism throughout his address. We suggest that Obama's shift to comic exceptionalism demonstrates how rhetoric constitutes orientations among interlocutors.