Reflection Of Image

Good image is important for leaders to gain the attention and the trust of their people. According to Merriam-Webster dictionary, image is the idea that people have about someone or something (“image”, n.d.). In order to maintain the desirable image stay in public’s mind, continuous action shown to public is needed. This kind of action could be done by doing several activities which support the development of the desirable image publicly.

In line with that, it could be said that image does not always represent the reality; since the image that someone has in their mind about someone or something could be different with the object in the real life. The reflection of image sometimes could be unreal and is different from the empirical reality.

And speech is also one of the weapons they use to become the winner. In United States, the current president Barack Obama won two elections in a row. In 2009, Barack Obama was inaugurated as the 44th president of the United States and on April 4, 2011, President Obama officially announced his candidacy for re-election. As a result of the election, On November 6, 2012, Obama was re-elected for his second term as President of the United States. The tradition that usually conduct by a winner of the election inUnited State is delivering a victory speech. In his first winning, Obama delivered his victory speech before hundreds of thousands of supporters in Chicago's Grant Park. In his second election, Obama became the first Democratic president since Franklin D. Roosevelt to twice win the majority of the popular vote and he addressed supporters and volunteers at Chicago's McCormick Place after his

Power abuse not only involves the abuse of force, for example in police aggression against black youths, and may result not merely in limiting the freedom of action of a specific group, but also and more crucially may affect the minds of people. That is, through special access to, and control over the mean of public discourse and communication, dominant groups or institutions may influence the structures of text and talk in such a way that, as a result, the knowledge, attitudes, norms, values and ideologies of recipients are – more or less indirectly affected in the interest of the dominant group (Van Dijk, 1996)

I am interested in analyze the ideological message inside the first and the second Obama’s victory speech and how Obama construct his ideology in his speech. As explain by van Dijk (1998), It is because linguistic analysis to a political figure is not only the analysis of the grammatical structure, but more in the analysis of what is the real meaning behind, why it is said that way, and who is actually the