Julian Castro Captivating the Crowd

Julian Castro uses many different functions of Political Communications during his speech on education in 2012 on ABC news. He is speaking as present mayor of San Antonio, Texas about how important opportunity and education are in today’s society. One interesting thing that Castro starts his speech off with is his praise for Obama, and how they both support many of the same causes. This is most definitely a form of identification, seeing that he is a democrat as well. He also begins with talking about how his family had a long struggle to get where they are now, which a lot of people can relate to. He comes from an immigrated family that had to go through a lot to be as successful as they are, which many people of the working had to do also.   

In my opinion, one of the strongest things that Castro does is continuously using the word, “opportunity”. I know that this is what his speech is based on, but using the word over and over makes it stick into the audience’s minds. He talks about moving forward and how the children of today are tomorrow’s future. He does a great job of connecting those large statements to how and why education is so important right now. Castro also uses the words leader, and choice continuously. He is telling the people in the audience and at home watching from TV that there is a choice in what lies ahead in the United States. This is an extremely strategic plan because he is telling everyone that change can happen, that the choice is in the hands of the people. I believe that this is an extremely smart strategy for getting the audience motived to do more for their country, and more for their community.

Another smart form of political communication that he uses which seems abnormal is getting the audience involved. He begins saying, “When it comes to expanding access to good health care, Mitt Romney says?” and the audience immediately all screams out, “No!” He goes on to ask more questions about subjects like gay marriage or equal pay for women and the audience all yells out, “NO!”. I think this was a great way to get the audience engaged in his speech and to get them riled about his concerns.

In my opinion, I think that Mayor Castro did an all around great job with this speech. There weren’t any functions of political communication that he left out of his speech that I could really think of. He did an excellent job of polarization and defining what he was talking about. When trying to, “read between the lines” I think what Castro was really trying to say was how essential Obama is to this country’s success. He purposely put Mitt Romney in a position where the audience had no choice but to putt him down, which emphasized how great of a leader Obama is. This was a speech given for education, opportunity, and for Obama to be reelected in 2012.