Bush the Conservative p. 5

It also must be admitted that the structure of analysis is prone to charges of arbitrariness and personal bias. The specific speeches used for analysis were not picked at random, but rather specifically targeted as containing references to President Bush’s tax agenda. It is simply not possible to randomly pick these speeches. Thus, there is a level of arbitrary choice involved in the rhetorical analysis. As well, when examining words for emotional content, it is impossible to pretend that the researcher’s emotions do not come into play.
The best solution to these arguments is for the theory to be applied broadly by many different researchers and upon many different examples of political speech. Individual attempts may then be excluded as being outside of the main body of literature that results, but the cumulative effort should become a significant contribution to the understanding of elite/mass communication in democracies. This paper, then, is merely a first step in that direction and by no means the final word.
In order to maintain the flow of the written paper, an appendix is included at the end with the full quotations utilized in the analysis. Quotes in the appendix are numbered and referenced within the text in order to maintain a certain level of readability. Sources for the full text of the speeches from which the quotes are taken are listed at the end of the Appendix rather than with the other citations in order to maintain a clear boundary between professional literature citations and purely analytical ones.

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