Ted Windt’s description of presidential crisis rhetoric helps explain the successes and the difficulties of President Bush’s war on terror. Immediately after the attacks, the president moved rhetorically to provide reassurance and to delegate policy direction. But President Bush’s rhetorical transformation of a faceless coward’s attack on our country into evil’s attack on everything good and proper in the world prepared us to respond against enemies beyond “those responsible for these attacks” even as his top advisors warned against doing so. The devil-angel melodrama provided the dramatistic proof Windt described, and when the president cast it in the form of a jeremiad, it reconciled contradictions and complicated counterargument and deliberation.
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