To play on the title of Big Joe Turner’s iconic hit song Shake, Rattle and Roll, the Democratic Debate could more properly be called Fake, Prattle and Droll. Although I didn’t have a stop watch in hand during the Democratic debate, it certainly seemed as if the Univision moderators concerned themselves with trying to enforce [...]
For about the first hour of the Democratic debate in Wisconsin, Clinton and Sanders expressed much mutual admiration for each other. Clinton repeatedly pointed to areas where there was general agreement on the end if not always the means. It quickly became clear that the audience they spoke to wasn’t sitting in the university auditorium [...]
If past debates are any indication, the upcoming Republican debate will witness neither the civility nor the discussion of issues evident in Thursday’s Democratic Debate. Let’s first look at areas of agreement, then who won on issues of clash and finally how effective the moderators were. The candidates agreed on the role the federal government [...]
Perhaps it's the somewhat civil nature of the campaign, or perhaps there really isn't much of a difference. Last night’s Democratic Town Hall debate provided some excellent opportunities for the Democratic candidates to make clearer the distinctions between their plans, their visions and their fight for the soul of the party. Unfortunately, both of the [...]
As the most recent Democratic debate proved, the Republicans have no monopoly on pandering to a base. While they congenially agreed on a number of issues, the big three differentiators they chose to highlight were Wall Street influence, healthcare and gun control. 1) Wall Street Reform When faced with the charge that Clinton was too [...]
Looking forward to some confrontation in what was otherwise predicted to be a dull exchange in the most recent Democratic debate, viewers watched to see how Clinton and Sanders would handle what some in the punditocracy have begun calling “datagate.” Those hoping for heated moments were disappointed as Sanders quickly explained and apologized for what [...]
Remember that one of Aristotle’s “available means of persuasion was logic, or what I refer to as “argument” in blog postings. To better understand how to judge the strength of an argument, it helps to have some tools at hand, so in this post I look at the structure and constituent parts. To effectively analyze [...]
I once had a colleague, who when she heard something she found difficult to believe, would exclaim: “Oh, tell the truth!” How I now wish she was asking the candidates questions, trying to weed through their fallacies. A fallacy is a mistake or deliberate misuse of one of the parts of argument. Fallacies often seem persuasive [...]
The post on the DNA of Argument introduced the role reasoning played in argument. I wrote that reasoning connected the evidence someone presents to the assertion someone makes. You could also think of reasoning as a bridge or a link. In this post, we take a closer look at some different types of reasoning and [...]
I begin with a caveat: If you ever read a book on argumentation or take a course in argument, you’ll likely see more distinctions among the different types of evidence than what I’m about to present. I’ve condensed the many different types into three general categories: 1) examples 2) statistics and 3) expertise. I chose [...]