Jo Tyler
       

            In 1990 when L. Douglas Wilder was inaugurated as the 66th Governor of Virginia, he became the first African-American elected to a governorship in U.S. history. The grandson of slaves, he was born in 1931 and educated in the segregated South. His improbable political success was a result in part of his discursive style. This paper explores the discourse themes and structures that characterized Wilder’s campaign for Governor and political speeches while in office. As he proclaimed in his inaugural address, “The force I represent is Virginia’s New Mainstream. It looks forward, not backwards. It tries to unify people, not divide them.” These themes of unification and progress echoed throughout his campaign. At the same time, Wilder exploited the more divisive themes of conservatism and liberalism, race, and class in his political speeches.
            To simultaneously represent unity and exploit classical electoral divisions, Wilder’s discourse characteristically synthesized his personal history with themes of national history. The result was a politically unifying, coalition-building metaphor: My story is the nation’s story.
            Among the morphosyntactic features that served in the construction of this metaphor are pronouns, tense and aspect, coordination, and subordination. These will be examined from a critical discourse perspective to elucidate Wilder’s negotiation of divisive and unifying themes in pursuit of his rhetorical and political goals.