I don’t anticipate anyone will mistake last night’s Vice Presidential debate for the Dialogues of Socrates.
But despite the immediate reaction I sensed from the news media (which consisted primarily of disappointment that they had not been witness to another game-changing event); I think there is something to learn from yesterday’s bout (beyond the issues discussed by the candidates which are, of course. all important).
But in terms of insights we can derive using the tools we’ve been studying, the first phenomena we should look at was that sense of disappointment I just mentioned which – while currently just a media meme – I expect will end up being the bottom line of the public’s “story” regarding the event.
I think this disappointment wells up primarily from the fact that the nature of last night’s debate provided us nothing that we didn’t anticipate. In fact, it followed the format we’ve become used to regarding Presidential and Vice Presidential “debates” that turn out to actually be occasions when opponents (sometimes skillfully, but often clumsily) see questions asked of them and challenges put to them as nothing more than hurdles to get over in order to get to talking points they had prepared in advance.
That’s why Vice President Biden, in response to a question about the recent attack on the American embassy in Libya (an issue currently causing discomfort within the administration), managed to segue within seconds into talking about the killing of Osama bin Laden. Similarly, Paul Ryan was able to plug unemployment statistics into nearly every answer to any question about government policy foreign and domestic (using them to run the clock out on tough questions regarding his ticket’s budget plans and the VP candidate’s own voting record).
Ryan, a relative newcomer to national debates of this type, seemed to have unrealistic expectations of what a single zinger could do for him. For instance, he had a particularly good laugh line meant to minimize the Romney “47% issue” by reminding Biden (who is notorious for his frequent public gaffes) that anyone can have a slip of the tongue. But Biden’s willingness to laugh right along with the joke turned this into a friendly barb between colleagues that did not prevent Biden from successfully returning to the 47% issue again and again. (In other words, it was not nearly as effective as the humor-based device Romney used in the first debate to get Obama to stop talking about the $7 trillion the Republicans were allegedly planning to add to the deficit.)
For his part, Biden’s strategy throughout the night seemed to be built around an informal fallacy called Argumentation from Outrage. This is something you see all the time on TV talk shows where the host bursts into flames over the slightest criticism, raising the temperature to such a degree that rational debate cannot continue (presuming it ever started). In Biden’s case, this outrage was exhibited through voice raising, endless interruptions and scoffing laughs and eye rolls, all of which were caught on split-screen, which meant either his voice or guffawing face was what everyone was paying attention to throughout the debate.
There have been some discussions in conservative circles with regard to whether Biden’s behavior will become the story (which they hope will rebound badly on the Democrats). But I suspect that this is just wishful thinking. For if a VP debate is rarely news in the first place, a VP debate that fit the debate template so predictably is doubly ignorable.
Because the candidates were joint speechifying, rather than debating, they had more opportunities to use many of the rhetorical devices and persuasive techniques you normally see in public addresses. (My son spotted four cases of anaphora in the first half hour before he went to bed – thankfully before both candidates pulled out tragic stories featuring dead children as part of pathos-based appeals.)
And while we could go through each of those in detail (or deconstruct one or more arguments we can try to excavate out of the candidate’s overlapping speeches), the big take-away from this event is the phenomena described in the last blog entry of how logos will always have to fight for space on stage with its rambunctious siblings pathos and ethos.
For what did people really take away from 90 minutes of “dialog,” but impressions: impressions of who could be trusted (based not just on words, but on body language and tenor of voice), impressions of who is more “one-heartbeat-away” Presidential, impressions of why either man is not on the top of the ticket (all filtered, of course, through our own confirmation biases).
And rather than weep over (or deny) the fact that our interaction with last night’s event was only partly influenced by logos, we should instead use the experience to gauge how much reason we are willing to commit to such an event based on how much reason-based information is genuinely being provided.
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