http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=50133689n
What is a Debate?
support opposing sides of a question. Debates follow a set of rules so that participants can state their positions and attack their opponents' views in a fair and orderly manner.
To begin, please read the following information on the types of debates and the history of presidential debates. THEN look at the assignment.
How Are Debates Used?
Forensic debates: Formal debates are held in schools or university debating societies as
By DAVID E. SANGER
How Are Debates Used?
Forensic debates: Formal debates are held in schools or university debating societies as
exercises to sharpen thinking and speaking skills and to examine issues.
Legislative debates: The House of Representatives and the Senate debate a bill by
allotting fair procedures and equal time for arguments for and against the bill. The English
House of Commons was the model for this process. State legislatures have provisions that are
similar.
Political debates: For instance, the Lincoln-Douglas debates for the Senate seat in Illinois
in 1858 gave the first speaker 60 minutes, the second 90 minutes, and the first speaker 30
minutes at the end. They were festive occasions in the open air, with thousands in the
audience.
What's the recent history of presidential debates?
The first televised Presidential debates in 1960 provided the thin margin of victory for John F.
Kennedy in a very close election. Despite their popularity, no more debates were held for 16
years. They resumed in the Ford-Carter election in 1976. Since then, debates have been a
perrmanent and very important feature of presidential elections.
FRAMING A DEBATE
ASSIGNMENT: DUE by the Sunday night at midnight October 28. You can of course be very productive and get it in early. You have three class days.
Before you do anything, you should familiarize yourself with the the framework being used to analyze Monday night's presidential debate, as well as the background information on how the debate was to be set up. This NY Times article will make the debate much more relevant and interesting. Do not forgo reading it. (see below). You will then listen to the debate- sometimes fast forwarding, other times repeating sections- to find examples of from the following list. Perhaps everything is not included, but you find many. You will take notes, quoting the canditate as needed. (write down those words / phrases). When you have completed your notetaking, you will compose a well-written commentary on the debate of no fewer than 300 words, the thesis being how the candidates employed age-old rhetorical methods to gain votes in the upcoming election. You will use specific information from the debate to support your statements. As always, you will include an analysis statement.
The mechanics of doing this assignment: open up a word document and copy and paste the criteria listed below. As you listen to the debate, plug in Romney and Obama's words as they might apply. Once you have listened through the debate- and yes, you will skim over some- you will take your notes and organize them into paragraphs. Look at the above thesis statement.
ie: Mr. Romney employs ________________________ when he notes ________________________. This served to _______________________________, Mr. Obama countered with ________________________________, which served to show (or indicated or proved, etc).
Note: the following was published in Sunday's paper.
Monday’s Debate Puts Focus on Foreign Policy Clashes
By DAVID E. SANGER
When President Obama and Mitt Romney sit down Monday night for the last of their three debates, two things should be immediately evident: there should be no pacing the stage or candidates’ getting into each other’s space, and there should be no veering into arguments over taxes.
This debate is about how America deals with the world — and how it should.
If the moderator, Bob Schieffer of CBS News, has his way, it will be the most substantive of the debates. He has outlined several topics: America’s role in the world, the continuing war in Afghanistan, managing the nuclear crisis with Iran and the resultant tensions with Israel, and how to deal with rise of China.
The most time, Mr. Schieffer has said, will be spent on the Arab uprisings, their aftermath and how the terrorist threat has changed since the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. No doubt the two candidates will spar again, as they did in the second debate, about whether the Obama administration was ready for the attack in Benghazi, Libya, that killed J. Christopher Stevens, the American ambassador, and three other Americans. Mr. Romney was widely judged to not have had his most effective critique ready, and this time, presumably, he will be out to correct that.
The early line is that this is an opportunity for Mr. Obama to shine, and to repair the damage from the first debate. (He was already telling jokes the other night, at a dinner in New York, about his frequent mention of Osama bin Laden’s demise.)
But we can hope that it is a chance for both candidates to describe, at a level of detail they have not yet done, how they perceive the future of American power in the world. They view American power differently, a subject I try to grapple with at length in a piece in this Sunday’s Review, “The Debatable World.”
But for now, here is a field guide to Monday’s debate.
LIBYA AND BENGHAZI Both candidates will come ready for a fight on this topic, but the question is whether it is the right fight. Mr. Obama already admitted mistakes on “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart” and promised to get to the bottom of them, but the White House has been less than transparent about what kind of warnings filtered up from the intelligence agencies before the attack on the consulate, and whether there was a way that American security forces could have arrived sooner, perhaps in time to save some of the American lives. No doubt the argument will focus on a narrower issue: why the administration stuck so long to its story that this was a protest against a film that turned into something worse, rather than a preplanned attack by insurgents. For Mr. Romney, the task is to show that the Benghazi attack was symptomatic of bigger failings in the Middle East, a road he started down in the last debate, but an argument he never completed.
IRAN With the revelation in The New York Times on Sunday reported by Helene Cooper and Mark Landler that the Obama administration has secretly agreed in principle to direct, bilateral talks after the election, the urgent question for the candidates is this: in a negotiation, what would you be willing to let Iran hold onto in return for a deal that gave the United States and Israel confidence that Tehran could not gain a nuclear weapons capability? It’s a hard question for both men.
Mr. Romney has said he would not allow Iran to have any enrichment capability at all — something it is allowed under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty as long as it is abiding by the treaty’s rules — a position that would kill any talks. But Mr. Obama does not want to say the obvious: that he is willing to allow Iran to hold onto some face-saving enrichment capability as long as it does not retain its stockpiles of medium-enriched fuel, which can be converted to bomb-grade. Also, look for answers to the question of whether the United States would back up Israel if it decided to conduct a military strike against Iran. Mr. Romney wants to show that Mr. Obama has created “daylight” between the United States and Israel; Mr. Obama wants to demonstrate that while he has Israel’s back, he is trying to protect the country from taking an action he considers unwise, at least at this stage.
CYBERWAR Mr. Obama cannot talk about “Olympic Games,” the covert program that the United States has conducted against Iran, with Israel’s help, using a cyberweapon against another country for the first time in history. But do Mr. Obama and Mr. Romney consider cyberweapons a legitimate tool in America’s arsenal, or too risky, since the United States is the most vulnerable country in the world? We have never heard either candidate answer the question.
AFGHANISTAN There was a time when Mr. Romney declared that America should not be negotiating with the Taliban, but that it should be killing all the Taliban. He stopped saying that after his aides suggested that it sounded like a prescription for endless war. Now both Mr. Romney and Mr. Obama say they think that America should be out of Afghanistan by 2014, the internationally agreed deadline for the withdrawal of forces, though Mr. Romney has the caveat that he wants to hear from his generals first. (The generals thought that Mr. Obama’s insistence on setting a clear deadline for withdrawal was a bad idea — as did Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and many others.) So what do we want to hear from the candidates?
Lots.
For starters, if it looks as if Kabul could fall back into Taliban hands in a few years, do either of them think the United States should re-intervene? It would be nice to know if Mr. Obama agrees with his vice president, Joseph R. Biden Jr., that all American troops should be out by the end of 2014, since the White House plan calls for an “enduring presence” of 10,000 to 15,000 troops that would back up the weak Afghan security forces and keep an eye on Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal. (The remaining base would also be a place to launch drone strikes into Pakistan and Afghanistan, when necessary.) And for Mr. Romney, if he believes the pullout in Iraq was too hasty, and the pullout in Afghanistan risks making the same mistake, what kind of continuing presence would he have in mind?
THE ARAB UPRISINGS Afghanistan is already in America’s rearview mirror, but the Arab uprisings are not. Mr. Romney says that the rise of Islamic governments is an Obama administration failure. The White House says that if you have free elections in Islamic nations, you cannot be surprised when the Muslim Brotherhood and the harder-line Salafists win control of the government. The question is how to deal with these governments: conditional aid, to ensure American values are respected? Trade restrictions? Gentle persuasion?
This would also be the area to understand when and why each man would advocate future interventions. Mr. Obama joined in the Libya strike, which Mr. Romney thought was a mistake. But Mr. Obama has been hesitant to do much in Syria — a very different kind of conflict — while Mr. Romney says he would arm the rebels with heavy-duty antiaircraft and antitank weapons. Since the light weapons are already going into the wrong hands, how exactly would he find a way to overthrow Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad?
CHINA Perhaps the most important long-term subject of the debate. Mr. Romney promises a hard line, saying he would declare China as a currency manipulator from Day 1 of his presidency. But he has not said much about Day 2, or Year 2. This is the moment for each candidate to describe how he would counter China’s growing claims in the South China Sea and other disputed territories, how he would handle trade tensions, and how he would manage a world in which the United States, for better or worse, is going to be reliant on Chinese investment in American debt for years to come. And it is the moment for each to give his view of the leadership change under way in China, where three-quarters of the top political posts are about to change hands.
This debate is about how America deals with the world — and how it should.
If the moderator, Bob Schieffer of CBS News, has his way, it will be the most substantive of the debates. He has outlined several topics: America’s role in the world, the continuing war in Afghanistan, managing the nuclear crisis with Iran and the resultant tensions with Israel, and how to deal with rise of China.
The most time, Mr. Schieffer has said, will be spent on the Arab uprisings, their aftermath and how the terrorist threat has changed since the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. No doubt the two candidates will spar again, as they did in the second debate, about whether the Obama administration was ready for the attack in Benghazi, Libya, that killed J. Christopher Stevens, the American ambassador, and three other Americans. Mr. Romney was widely judged to not have had his most effective critique ready, and this time, presumably, he will be out to correct that.
The early line is that this is an opportunity for Mr. Obama to shine, and to repair the damage from the first debate. (He was already telling jokes the other night, at a dinner in New York, about his frequent mention of Osama bin Laden’s demise.)
But we can hope that it is a chance for both candidates to describe, at a level of detail they have not yet done, how they perceive the future of American power in the world. They view American power differently, a subject I try to grapple with at length in a piece in this Sunday’s Review, “The Debatable World.”
But for now, here is a field guide to Monday’s debate.
Mr. Romney has said he would not allow Iran to have any enrichment capability at all — something it is allowed under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty as long as it is abiding by the treaty’s rules — a position that would kill any talks. But Mr. Obama does not want to say the obvious: that he is willing to allow Iran to hold onto some face-saving enrichment capability as long as it does not retain its stockpiles of medium-enriched fuel, which can be converted to bomb-grade. Also, look for answers to the question of whether the United States would back up Israel if it decided to conduct a military strike against Iran. Mr. Romney wants to show that Mr. Obama has created “daylight” between the United States and Israel; Mr. Obama wants to demonstrate that while he has Israel’s back, he is trying to protect the country from taking an action he considers unwise, at least at this stage.
CYBERWAR Mr. Obama cannot talk about “Olympic Games,” the covert program that the United States has conducted against Iran, with Israel’s help, using a cyberweapon against another country for the first time in history. But do Mr. Obama and Mr. Romney consider cyberweapons a legitimate tool in America’s arsenal, or too risky, since the United States is the most vulnerable country in the world? We have never heard either candidate answer the question.
Lots.
For starters, if it looks as if Kabul could fall back into Taliban hands in a few years, do either of them think the United States should re-intervene? It would be nice to know if Mr. Obama agrees with his vice president, Joseph R. Biden Jr., that all American troops should be out by the end of 2014, since the White House plan calls for an “enduring presence” of 10,000 to 15,000 troops that would back up the weak Afghan security forces and keep an eye on Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal. (The remaining base would also be a place to launch drone strikes into Pakistan and Afghanistan, when necessary.) And for Mr. Romney, if he believes the pullout in Iraq was too hasty, and the pullout in Afghanistan risks making the same mistake, what kind of continuing presence would he have in mind?
This would also be the area to understand when and why each man would advocate future interventions. Mr. Obama joined in the Libya strike, which Mr. Romney thought was a mistake. But Mr. Obama has been hesitant to do much in Syria — a very different kind of conflict — while Mr. Romney says he would arm the rebels with heavy-duty antiaircraft and antitank weapons. Since the light weapons are already going into the wrong hands, how exactly would he find a way to overthrow Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad?
Framing a debate is a method of giving political thoughts a context or a lens through which to see the issues at stake. Each side of a debate will try to control how an issue is seen, as this is crucial to gaining credibility and the political support needed to pass legislation or advance an agenda.
STYLE vs. FUNCTION
1. Language Language is important in framing concepts. For instance, when President George W. Bush took office in 2001, he used the term "tax relief" where the common term had been "tax cut." Relief here indicates an alleviation of suffering and so makes arguing against tax cuts difficult because many people want relief. This tactic worked because the Democrats were soon using the term, a turn of events which worked in favor of the Republican agenda to lower tax rates.
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2. Imagery imagery involves one or more of your five senses (hearing, taste, touch, smell, sight). The speaker uses a word or phrase to stimulate your memory of those senses
3. Repetition Not only must a politician devise a new way to frame a debate with language or image, but (s)he needs to have the new frame repeated. Repeating a message helps to make it effective. In this way, Democrats were able to frame President George W. Bush as lacking gravitas. Republican education reform became known as "no child left behind," a position that few could argue against without appearing to be against children.
4. Persuasion techniques
Politicians’ most powerful arguments can be misleading. In fact, research shows we’re often
swayed by faulty logic. As you listen to the presidential candidates debate the issues, give them
the “logic check-up.” Listen carefully to the both canidates. Note if any of the following techniques in used and in what context.
“If he’s okay with General Colin Powell, then he’s okay with me.”
swayed by faulty logic. As you listen to the presidential candidates debate the issues, give them
the “logic check-up.” Listen carefully to the both canidates. Note if any of the following techniques in used and in what context.
Appeal to Emotion- summons fear, anger or pity.
Bandwagon- encourages the listener to do something because it is popular
“More and more of us want new blood in Washington, and we’re voting for Jones.”
Card Stacking-Presents the evidence in a partial or slanted way.
“The average income is rising” - technically correct, but only the top 10% incomes are up.
False Cause-Insists that one event caused the other just because it came first.
“As soon as Jones was elected, savings banks began to fail.”
False Dilemma-Poses only two choices when there are a variety of possibilities.
“Choose Smith and you’ll get inflation; choose Jones and the budget will be balanced.”
Glittering Generalities - says little specifically, but conveys .“John Jones has made this nation a better place.”
Hasty Generalization-Bases a conclusion on insufficient evidence.
“Dropping out of school must be a problem because I saw an article about it.”
Name Calling- Uses negative labels to stigmatize opponents.
“My opponent is a card-carrying liberal.”
Slippery Slope:-Claims that an event will lead to an uncontrollable chain reaction.
“First they outlaw machine guns, and then they’ll take your hunting rifles.”
Testimonial - Convinces only through the endorsement of a respected personality.
“If he’s okay with General Colin Powell, then he’s okay with me.”
“
H
Slippery Slope: Claims that an event will lead to an uncontrollable chain reaction.
“First they outlaw machine guns, and then they’ll take your hunting rifles.”
H
Testimonial: Convinces only through the endorsement of a respected personality.
“If he’s okay with General Colin Powell, then he’s okay with me.”
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