<![CDATA[Metaphors in high-stakes political discourse serve as essential cognitive frameworks that shape public perception, evoke shared cultural conceptualizations, and mediate complex institutional transitions. This study investigates how Barack Obama strategically deploys conceptual metaphors in his 2024 Democratic National Convention address to establish emotional resonance with voters, reframe partisan competition, and facilitate surrogate endorsement and charisma transfer to Vice President Kamala Harris. Applying a mixed qualitative and quantitative discourse-analytic design, the study analyzes Obama’s 3,542-word verbatim address through the combined lenses of Conceptual Metaphor Theory, Sharifian’s Cultural Linguistics framework, and Critical Discourse Analysis, utilizing the Metaphor Identification Procedure (MIP/MIPAR). The analysis identified 23 metaphor tokens across 18 distinct conceptual metaphor types, yielding a density of 6.49 metaphors per 1,000 words and a high type-token ratio of 78.3%. Four primary functional themes emerged: delegitimizing the political opposition (34.78%), promoting unity and community solidarity (30.43%), inspiring collective hope and optimism (26.09%), and honoring legacy and intergenerational leadership transition (8.70%). Rather than escalating apocalyptic fear, the rhetoric operationalizes a novel strategy of domestic demotion, trivially reframing political demagoguery as low-status domestic nuisances, while deploying structural relay tropes to dignify candidate succession and confer historical legitimacy onto the new nominee. The findings demonstrate that political persuasion benefits from substituting polarizing fear appeals with paired domestic counter-metaphors and culturally grounded schemas, proving that effective leadership communication relies on aligning cognitive frames with shared cultural values to foster sustainable civic engagement and national cohesion.]]>
