ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the language of hope and promises through another first in the 240-year history of the United States of America, namely, the election of an African-American President, Barack Hussein Obama. In studying and reviewing over 370 of Obama's speeches and addresses between July 27, 2004 and May 15, 2016, three consistent themes emerge in his tenure as President: hope, imagination, and promise. For the quantitatively minded, the language of hope, and its opposite, despair, fear, cynicism/cynic, appears 1,433 times; the language of imagination, including possibility/possible/imagine, 762 times; and the language of promise, 452 times. The chapter analyses the speeches of Obama. When confronted with the uncertainty and unpredictability of the future, Obama could be interpreted as intentionally attempting to bring stability to his country through the language and practice of hope and promise. The chapter addresses his capacity to choose the politics of hope with a singular purpose in mind, namely allowing the "promise of a new day".
