Barack Obama’s second inaugural address was given in 2013 before his second term as president of the United States. The purpose of an inaugural address is to inform the people of the president’s plans they hope to accomplish during their term. Obama’s address was effective because it is very difficult not to accomplish this, but it wasn’t effective just because he mentioned his intentions during the speech. Some of the main points Obama hoped to tackle during his second term were reclaiming the spirit of the founding fathers, gay rights, climate change, and immigration. Obama was able to effectively state what he had in plan for America’s future through the use of several rhetorical tools; specifically parallelism, alliteration, and anithesis.
