As I was looking through the news today, I stumbled across an article in which the headline read, "Poll finds 18 percent of voters persuadable" http://news.yahoo.com/page/election-2008-political-pulse-the-persuadables. Not long before the presidential election itself, eighteen percent of voters say they do not know who they are going to vote for or are willing to change their decision. Many people agree that neither candidate is the right man for dealing with the issue of economics in the United States during the present time, which does not assist in choosing one person.

Eighteen percent of all voters seems like quite a few people who could easily be swayed to vote one way or another, or even change who they were originally voting for. The article states, "Whichever presidential candidate convinces a swath of persuadable voters that he gets it...Could win the White House http://news.yahoo.com/page/election-2008-political-pulse-the-persuadables. This stresses the exact point mentioned in Crowley's, Ancient Rhetoric for Contemporary Students: rhetoric. In the beginning of her book, Crowley mentions the fact that "[rhetors] can make language do what they want it to do, can make listeners or readers hear or read in the way they intended" (Crowley, 25). This comparison provides evidence that in ancient times, rhetors were much like the presidential candidates of modern time, in that both are striving to be persuasive. Rhetors used language to manipulate others to do as they wanted them to, while modern Presidential candidates use language to win the persuasion of the majority of the people and work their way into office.