Definition
Political speech is oratory delivered in the service of political ends — campaigning for office, advocating policy, mobilising supporters, attacking opponents, addressing the nation, commemorating events, or consolidating authority. It is the most public and most studied genre of modern rhetoric, and the principal arena in which the classical tradition continues to be enacted.
The category is not unified. It includes the deliberative oratory of legislatures (parliamentary debate, Senate floor speeches), the campaign rhetoric of elections (stump speeches, debates, rallies), the ceremonial oratory of high office (inaugurals, state funerals, war addresses), the demagogic oratory of mass movements, and the speeches of authoritarian regimes engineered for mass display. Each sub-genre has its own conventions, but all share the political function of building, sustaining, or dismantling collective political agency.
Why it matters
How it works
A political speech in the modern democratic tradition combines deliberative argument (this policy, this candidate), epideictic celebration (these values, this nation), and forensic charge (this opponent's record, this failure of the other side). The mix varies by occasion: a stump speech leans toward epideictic and forensic; a State of the Union toward deliberative within an epideictic frame; a war address toward all three at maximum amplitude.
The genre's defining tension is between the speech as performance and the speech as argument. Television rewards performance; democratic deliberation requires argument. Speeches that are all argument fail to move; speeches that are all performance fail to persuade anyone who is not already moved. The best political oratory — Lincoln at Gettysburg, Churchill in 1940, Mandela on his release, Obama in 2008 — combines both, leaving an argument that an audience has been brought, by the performance, to feel rather than just understand.