Post-Debate Instruction

I’ve coached competitive high school debate for the past thirteen years, earning two diamond awards from the National Forensic League. I also have taught an elective speech class, and I regularly work debate activities into my English classes, especially as a means to teach persuasive writing and speaking.

To that end, I’d like to tackle yesterday’s Presidential debate from the standpoint of what I would like my own students to take away from it. Here are some of the instructional points that I would bring up in the classroom. Bear in mind that I’m simply highlighting the way each candidate expressed their viewpoint and managed their message during their two hours of stage and screen time. I’m not engaging in fact-checking here, nor am I arguing the merits of either side’s claims. I’m more interested in the candidates’ strategies and execution as public speakers and debaters.

1) Romney debated more than the President , and actually brought more actual clash to the contest than I have seen in some time. These staged political debates are often rhetorical flea markets, with each candidate selling their own sound bite swag to the gawking public. The speakers rarely address each other directly. The governor, however, launched several pointed attacks against the President’s policies that the incumbent rarely addressed. The biggest scores: White House tax policies hit the top 3% of small businesses, who employ a quarter of American workers; Obama’s energy plan isn’t deficit friendly when $2.8 billion in oil subsidies are cut while $90 billion is given to alternative energy. Direct charges, on point, but the President did not engage in reciprocal rebuttal for most of the night.

2) Romney controlled the narrative last night. He successfully pivoted a number of topics last night to a consistent theme: “Obama’s policies hurt jobs because they make employers skittish about hiring.” Romney did quite a good job of linking taxes and health care, in particular, to this message, and it’s the first time I can recall him being so specific as to why or how the President’s work is unfriendly to employment. Obama has been labeled a “job killer” by Republicans for some time now, but last night, the governor finally explained why the White House merits the claim.

3) If the format of this debate was designed to enable both sides to present clear frameworks for governance, then both sides failed. Both candidates delivered principled frameworks; I think the policy guidelines of each side are pretty clear. Their actual policies, on the other hand, were not clarified or well explained on either end. The Obamacare discussion really highlights this point. Romney’s speeches emphasized what he’d keep from the law, yet they never enumerated how the governor would replace other provisions. In sum, the bulk of this section focused on the best parts of the legislation. If Romney scored with precise attacks on the status quo that went unrefuted earlier, he largely failed to describe how his own Presidency would differ from that same status quo. This was true throughout the debate, and Obama, for his part, failed to specify why his policies have worked or would work well enough to merit a second term.

 4) The questions were terrible. They were like bad essay topics that practically mandate a rambling response. How do you differ in terms of your perception of the role of government? What are your differences on Social Security? This frame of “outline your differences” actually makes the prompts expository, not persuasive. It doesn’t require either candidate to defend one set of ideas as better or worse; they need only point out the contrasts. Authentic debate requires persuasion, so the topics need to be controversial statements that require defense and invite criticism. Social Security needs a fundamental overhaul. Regulation of the private sector should be substantially reduced. Bold statements like these would force the speakers to advocate a specific position. If a candidate tried to rely strictly on vague platitudes, the precision of the topic at hand would render such a tactic painfully obvious to the audience. Sadly, the moderator’s questions seem to encourage such vagueness, and the audience often loses the opportunity to see a true tug-of-war, in terms of persuasion.

5) For the history classroom: this election still reminds me of 2004. Senator and challenger John Kerry crushed the first debate but could not sustain the momentum. Both then and now, we’re evaluating a sitting President’s response to a calamity that basically kicked off his term, the situation is anything but resolved at this point, and the administration’s policies have proven incredibly divisive. Heck, I even suspect that Romney is borrowing Kerry’s jawline.

During that campaign, the vice presidential debate that year actually began to swing the momentum towards the incumbent. Despite his famously botched reference to FactCheck.org, Cheney flexed his experience well enough to make Edwards seem a worthy yet ultimately inferior challenger.  We’ll see if the coming weeks continue to hold true to the script.