Between the Critical Voter blog and podcast, we’ve managed to leverage TV ads, speeches and debate performance to demonstrate the use of various critical thinking tools. But for this revisit on how to diagram arguments, we’re going to use a campaign artifact we’ve not gotten to yet: the national television interview.
Such TV interviews used to be much more of a staple of Presidential campaigns. But as nightly network news recedes in importance in our fragmented media age, candidates seem to be avoiding the unpredictability that comes with an appearance before Diane Sawyer (vs. talking to local media in swing states, or friendly media on partisan cable programs).
Nonetheless, President Obama decided to take a chance on an appearance before Sawyer on ABC News, primarily as a means to regain momentum after a bad week. And this appearance illustrated the hazards of stepping before the cameras in an uncontrolled situation, in this case one in which the interviewer seemed primarily interested in asking and re-asking him the same question, which was (and I’m paraphrasing): Why did you stink up the joint so much during last week’s debate?
Under such circumstances, the President was not able to present as many arguments as he would have no doubt liked. But if you get past his skilled avoidance of demands that he Monday morning quarterback his own debate performance, his key post-debate argument can be discerned which can be summed up as:
Mitt Romney took one set of positions in front of certain audiences (such as Republican voters during the Primaries, or funders such as those he sat before during the now infamous “47% Secret Meeting”) and is now saying something completely different to the general voting public. This level of inconsistency can only be explained if the Republican candidate is hiding something (such as the true nature of his proposals) or is generally dishonest. But whatever the motivation, such inconsistency means he does not deserve your vote.
You will notice that I did not boil down this argument into the type of “All As are Bs” statements that would be used if we were to analyze the President’s argument using Aristotelian syllogisms. This is partly because we already did such an analysis on a negative campaign ad directed at the President (both on the blog and during a podcast). But another reason to keep the argument in natural language is that it shows how the Toulmin argument maps we discussed on both the blog and podcast allow us to preserve a great deal of this natural language without having to translate it into formal logical statements.
So let’s recast this argument in the form of a Toulmin argument map as follows:
As I mentioned during the last podcast, accusations of hypocrisy (which zero in on our natural discomfort with inconsistency) can be very effective rhetorically (much better than accusations of lying – which Sawyer tried to goad the President into making – which can come off as shrill and mean).
But does this particular accusation of inconsistency make a strong argument, one that can withstand challenge using Toulmin as a guide?
Let’s find out.
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