Hope. Maverick.

These two words have dominated this year’s presidential campaigns, and whether the messages of U.S. Sens. Barack Obama and John McCain are influencing voters will be up for debate Oct. 12 during a Kansas University College of Liberal Arts and Sciences program.

KU communication studies professor and department chairman Robert Rowland will dissect the slogans and rhetoric used during his presentation, “The Audacity of Hope, or a Maverick You Can Trust.”

Rowland said he has helped seven candidates for Congress and candidates for state offices develop persuasive political messages.

Some of the most interesting he’s seen so far in the presidential campaigns have been McCain’s ads painting Obama as a celebrity, he said.

“Literature on advertising says negative advertising in particular can be very effective if it has a dominant narrative the audience finds powerful,” Rowland said.

During his presentation, Rowland will show clips from campaigns, and he will primarily focus on the “big themes” in the candidates’ rhetoric before drawing final conclusions on each. There will also be a question and answer session.

“It’s obvious right now in this political climate that what Obama has been doing in the last three weeks is doing better than McCain right now,” he said.

Rowland said McCain has run a traditional Republican campaign, “focusing on policy while featuring his personal identity as a maverick.”

Obama is “running on the ‘hope’ theme, which is really about … recasting the American Dream in broadly communitarian terms,” he said.

Obama’s rhetorical style stands out among past presidential candidates, he said.

“Someone with Obama’s particular ability doesn’t come along very often,” Rowland said. “I think it’s quite clear that Obama’s big weapon is his ability to motivate people with his words.”

Rowland said that to some extent, he could say the same thing about McCain, because his consistent messages pulled him through the Republican primaries.