Ms. Weingarten, who has long opposed the cuts — both budgetary and rhetorical — made to teachers, told her audience that the current debate on education "has been hijacked by a group of self-styled reformers" from "on high" who want to blame educators' benefits and job security for states' notorious budget problems.
In perhaps his finest rhetorical flourish, making reference to Dr Martin Luther King Jr, he suggested that although he carries the scars of seven years in office, his fundamental optimism – hope and change – in the American people is undimmed.
The most influential literary critic of his time in the German-speaking world, he was feared by writers and enjoyed by readers for his often devastating reviews, which combined conviction, subjectivity and rhetorical finesse, making them immensely powerful.
One imagines Obama, with his usual rhetorical deftness, making the point that the neo-secessionists and the neo-Nazis are not merely extraneous, obnoxious fringe groups they represent exactly the enemies whom Americans united to defeat in their two most consequential wars.
But Brand's rhetorical flourishes made up for the lack of detail.
Obama's rhetorical skill makes his candidacy appear almost collective rather than individual.
Mailer's rhetorical jousting made telegenic entertainment - but there was something else.
He pre-empted a rhetorical proposal made centuries later by John Maynard Keynes: since pointless work was better than none, the unemployed could be paid to build a pyramid on Salisbury Plains, or transport Stonehenge to London.
Those expressed goals (or rhetorical strategy) make it hard to talk about the challenges Musk's many businesses face or contradict certain assumptions around them.
All these literary and rhetorical features make medieval philosophical texts considerably more difficult to understand and interpret than modern or even classical philosophical texts.
