Political Frustrations

A Presidential Debate featuring vastly different ideologies.  Two men arguing with each other to prove their side.  Two men not accomplishing their goal.

This week I watched the last presidential debate (which was actually my first debate of the election year).  I had a general idea of what to expect due to past experiences watching political or academic debates, but my interpretation of the debate has changed after spending some time in Rhetoric and Civic Life. Despite the great intelligence and rhetorical capabilities of both candidates, I was extremely bothered by the way they handled the subject matter.  I realized that the conversation was probably in stasis for only around 10 minutes of an hour and a half debate.

Judging the reaction by some of my friends regarding the previous debates, this disagreement over what to discuss has happened quite frequently, even this year. It seems that the candidates have often used a pivot, so as to take each question posed by the moderator and alter it so that they can answer the question that they would prefer to answer.  As a viewer, this is extremely frustrating and hard to watch.  How can an argument come close to stasis if the two sides aren’t even attempting to address the same question?

In the debate that I watched, the topic was supposed to be foreign policy.  At some point in the night the candidates were arguing over unemployment and the economy and I had stopped paying attention.  Though both President Obama and Governor Romney are excellent orators, they lose a lot of ethos when they refuse to address a question or choose to focus on entirely different topics.  For me personally, it did not matter what logic the candidate used in his reply; if the conversation was not on par with the topic or question as posed by the moderator, the discussion was not going to be effective.

I understand that sometimes in an argument one side can get off-topic a bit, but the stasis of the overall conversation should remain relatively intact.  With this presidential debate, however, the topic was so inconsistent that neither side could possibly agree on the conjecture or definition of the issues in time to move on and truly debate quality, or policy.

Honestly, the debate left me frustrated and feeling like no progress had been made.  I could not pick a candidate that I preferred throughout the debate, and I wished that we could have redone the whole thing and had a real conversation.  I recognize that others probably did not feel this way and may have been greatly influenced by the debate, but I feel that due to the way modern presidential candidates shirk some questions, the whole conversation is left in a state of merely shouting over one another and never making any progress. Stasis is key to making progress and beginning a true deliberation; without it, this debate was lacking in content and character.