Abstract
This thesis analyzes the campaign rhetoric of John McCain and Barack Obama in the context of Lynn Vavreck's theory of clarifying and insurgent campaigns, and finds that the onset of the financial crisis constrained the ability of the campaigns to freely choose the issues on which to run, as well as significantly benefitted Barack Obama's presidential campaign as compared to John McCain's. Furthermore, it uses Jonathan Haidt's Moral Foundations theory to provide content analysis of the specific electioneering rhetoric of the two campaigns, and finds that the two candidates increasingly relied on morally charged language as the campaign went on. In sum, it finds that although the Financial Crisis alone was unlikely to sink one campaign or salvage the other, the combination of the onset of the crisis, the historical context of the election, and the nature of the news media had significant effects on both campaigns.