Let’s start by highlighting the biggest prediction I got wrong in this piece and this one that tried to use the critical thinking principles (particularly those involving rhetoric) to anticipate what the candidates would do during last night’s third Presidential debate.
To begin with, tropes did not take center stage, despite the fact that the foreign policy subjects being debated beg for the simple and concrete images tropes provide to get around how much detail and disagreement can’t be fit into a two minute talk on subjects as complex as the Middle East and China.
“Apology Tour” made an appearance, as predicted; as did a trope that combined the notion of “Trillion Dollar Wars” and foreign soldiers “Standing Up While America Stands Down” (Obama’s repeated mentioning of using money to “do some nation-building here at home”). But to my shock, Obama’s rival seemed to have made the conscious decision to leave the phrase “Leading from Behind” on the cutting room floor.
The only person who seemed more surprised than me at the absence of this phrase was the President who found himself making a long argument regarding the intricacies of crafting complex coalitions behind the scenes with only we rhetoric dweebs recognizing this explanation for what it was: a pre-fab retaliation for a trope that never got deployed.
As anticipated, the debate itself followed the template of most debates these days with the candidates finding ways to bring the conversation around to their preferred topics, regardless of the question being asked. And the topic of choice was clearly domestic politics which took up between one-third and one-half the entire debate (despite the alleged foreign policy focus of last night’s event).
Again, if you understand that the real audiences for last night’s contestants were: (1) a base that still needs to be energized; (2) undecided voters in swing states; and (3) the media, responses that seem clumsy and bizarre make perfect sense, such as:
- Why did Obama keep punching away, even though it was clear early on that his opponent was not going to repeat his aggressive performance of previous debates? In order to assure the President’s base that he was a fighter whose passive performance in the first debate was a fluke.
- Why a repeat of economic talking points and attacks that were thoroughly hashed out in previous debates (such as Romney’s Five Point Plan for economic growth or fights over Obamacare and Medicaid)? Because these are the domestic issues that “resonate” with women between the ages of 35-55 in Ohio and other key battleground states.
- Why did a debate ostensibly on America’s relationship with the rest of the planet never seem to get beyond the Middle East? Because other parts of the world are not aflame, meaning our relationships with them are “boring” (i.e., not media worthy).
I was definitely wrong with regard to the type of name dropping I thought we’d hear last night (generals remained an abstraction, such as the “Joint Chiefs of Staff” who are supposedly not asking for the military hardware Mitt Romney wants to buy). And leaders were identified by the country they led (such as “The Prime Minister of Israel” vs. “Prime Minister Netenyahu” or Joe Biden’s “Bibi”), which may simply reflect the formal language both candidates chose to use during the few parts of the debate they could not swing back to their preferred subjects of economics and employment.
Interestingly, Governor Romney forewent the “gotchas” that didn’t work so well for him in the second debate, although that seems to have been part of a strategy to “look Presidential” by not repeating the hostile, stalking performance both candidates gave in the second debate.
Of course, the fact that they were sitting down vs. circling around each other like hungry predators may have contributed to the overall lowering of hostility we saw last night (as did the presence of the great-grandfatherly moderator). And the structure of the debate coupled with the genteel manner of that moderator all but guaranteed that the debate could only be analyzed based on the pre-written talking points both candidates had at the ready, as opposed to how they managed to deploy those points on stage.
Obama’s “bayonets and horses” crack, for example, was not a spontaneous response to an unexpected Romney statement regarding the size of the navy, but a pre-written line laying in wait in case Romney’s pre-known talking point on the matter came up.
Similarly, Romney’s statements on Syria and Afghanistan were crafted in such a way as to (1) try to create the appearance of differences between he and the President on matters where there is actually not much daylight between both candidate’s positions and (2) assure undecided voters sizing him up that he’s not smacking his lips in anticipating of starting another foreign war (a sentiment that helps explain the Republicans choice to include the word “peace” in his closing statement nearly half a dozen times).
While these choices are all interesting at the strategic level, unfortunately they make both candidates far less interesting with regard to their use of rhetoric and argumentation. For genuinely interesting rhetoric requires a level of risk taking and spontaneity you won’t find in candidates whose key goal is avoiding error. And argumentation requires opponents to actually debate one another, rather than reassure out-of-work college grads in Florida, Pennsylvania or other swing state that everything is going to be OK (as long as they cast their ballot correctly).
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