1996 State of the Union Address: Parallelism & Anaphora

    1996 State of the Union Address: Parallelism & Anaphora

      Parallelism means repeating syntax, or sentence structure. Anaphora means repeating words. They're sort of the Gemini twins of rhetorical devices, since they both have to do with repetition, repetition, repetition.

      One of the most famous passages from Bill Clinton's speech is a master class in both:

      We know big government does not have all the answers. We know there's not a program for every problem. We know, and we have worked to give the American people a smaller, less bureaucratic government in Washington...The era of big government is over. But we cannot go back to the time when our citizens were left to fend for themselves. (7.1-6)

      One effect of repetition is to create a build-up to a climactic point. "The era of big government is over" definitely qualifies as climactic. That was basically the political Keyser Soze reveal of the '90s.

      Clinton repeats "we" and "know" to emphasize that he's speaking for a government that wants to make itself work more intelligently. He also uses a repeating sentence structure ("we know this, we know that") to ice the rhetorical cake.

      Mmm. Rhetorical cake.