Clinton's Bully Pulpit

The understanding of the American president can be diverse from the perspectives of different disciplines among which Western Rhetoric tends to interpret this figure as a symbol built on rhetorical strategies. The various images showed in various rhetorical situations are aimed for the maximum discourse effect for audience's identification. The presidency--- the kind of authority equipped with only by the president acts a force multiplier for presidential discourse, which greatly facilitates the projection of president's ethos under that specific situation even before the discourse.Much positive and effective discussion and research work, from either a political or a cross-cultural perspective, have been conducted by domestic academia on the American president and presidential politics. However, due to the disciplinary difference, few studies have been carried out from the perspective of Western Rhetoric. Neither has the essence of the figure--- the rhetoricality been studied, for which the researches still lack the basic standpoint. That is the external factor that gives rise to this study. Rhetoric is power; rhetoric distributes power; the interaction between ethos and authority to a great extent determines the discourse effect. While the internal factor of the study lies in how to reconstruct the figure---American president by understanding their discourse and accordingly establish our countermeasures to strengthen our discourse power and discourse effect.From the perspective of Western Rhetoric, this paper will appeal to the theories on ethos and authority from the Classical Rhetoric and Modern Rhetoric, adopt as its methodology a combination of descriptive, inductive, and diachronic/synchronic approaches to analyze the fundamental characteristics of American president(by taking Bill Clinton as a typical example). The conclusion of the thesis is that, the projection of ethos relies on and subjects to the relevant authority; our strategies of dealing with them should not be influenced by the divergent ethos projected deliberately; instead, we are supposed to identify the motives of specific projection and accordingly, set up more effective countermeasures.