The George W. Bush Administration's embrace of neoconservative, messianic, unilateral, and militaristic foreign policies has provided fertile ground for scholars of American exceptionalism. The list of incidences prompting scholarly investigation of the Bush administration's claim to exceptional status has focused on use of “preventive wars” against sovereign nations, the use of torture and extraordinary rendition of prisoners, dismissal and disregard of United Nation authority, refusal to sign multi-national treaties that address environmental concerns and human rights, resort to military force rather than diplomacy; and refusal to recognize the authority of the International Criminal Court. While the U.S. self-appointed role in determining global economic, political, and moral agendas waned, the 2008 presidential media campaigns heated up. On the eve of the election, the U.S. military was set to withdraw from Iraq without achieving political goals, the simmering war in Afghanistan mushroomed into major conflict, and the full catastrophic consequences of unregulated, free-market ideology on world economies started taking its toll. Did these realities resonate as an end to American exceptionalism in the rhetoric of Barack Obama's presidential media campaign? This paper investigates the rhetorical strategies of Barack Obama's media campaign, including books, speeches, and web communications designed to unify Americans around an alternative vision of America both at home and abroad. As a second generation immigrant, as an African American raised by a single mother who rose through the educational meritocracy to political influence, Obama is a living embodiment of many American values used by the campaign to rekindle and reclaim the American Dream, as the subtitle his book, The Audacity of Hope, proposes.