Stump Speech – Logos and Pathos

It’s time to take a look at an actual campaign artifact and see what critical thinking lessons can be drawn from it. 

As the campaign heats up, we’ll be spoiled for choice on what to analyze, but for the next few postings, I’d like to take a look at some familiar political devices, starting with the “stump speech.”

This is the standard speech a candidate gives on the campaign trail, sometimes more than a dozen times a day.  Candidate speeches are interesting in that, unlike TV commercials, they allow a candidate to fully flesh out the ideas and themes behind their candidacy.  They also allow a candidate to play the high-minded Dr. Jeckyl (allowing TV ads and surrogates to act as Mr. Hyde by delivering accusations and condemnations that would sound terrible coming out of the mouth of the candidate him or herself).

Because public speeches are the direct descendent of the type of political oratory around which the rules of rhetoric developed, they still utilize techniques and devices that have been analyzed and categorized for more than two millennia. 

But forces of modernity (especially with regard to media) influence this classic form in a number of significant ways.  Most importantly, because a candidate can count on every word in their speech being dissected and rebroadcast (both in and out of context), public speeches today must be carefully constructed to minimize internal phrases or sentences that would sound terrible separated from the whole (and broadcast to the world).  They must also strive for consistency with previous speeches, as well as the candidate’s overall track record, in order to not provide ammunition to those ready to make accusations of hypocrisy (one of the worst curses in our political lexicon).

We’ll start by looking at this stump speech by presumed Republican Presidential contender Mitt Romney.   Now this speech was actually given in January when Romney was still running in a heated primary.  But because most of his speech focuses on his presumed future Democratic rival (rather than present Republican ones), it’s likely that these will be his words of choice during the actual Presidential campaign.  I also like the fact that the newspaper in which this speech was reproduced used the occasion to dissect some of the language for rhetorical themes (indicating recognition of public interest in some of the things we’re discussing here).

In addition to the general requirements of stump speeches described above, candidates bring their own strengths and challenges to this rhetorical form.  Former Governor Romney, for example, is known to be an average public speaker, which means he is less likely to use some of the rhetorical flourishes a more polished speaker would use to avoid having his words sound artificial and written.  Because the candidate is known to be extremely wealthy (and because this year’s Presidential campaign is likely to include themes pitting the wealthy “1%” against “the rest of us”), Romney has an additional requirement to avoiding sounding too patrician, while also avoiding sounding as though he’s posing as a pleb.

Like most speeches, this one blends logos (an appeal to logic) and pathos (an appeal to emotion), with Romney’s focus primarily on the state of the US economy.  The logic behind his appeal is fairly straightforward and can be broken down into a relatively simple syllogism:

* The economy has gotten worse since Barak Obama became President

* A candidate who presided over the worsening of the economy should not be re-elected

* Therefore: You should vote for a candidate other than Barak Obama

Obviously, his presentation is more sophisticated than the three statements above, and he does make additional linked arguments that indicate Obama’s current economic policies are ingrained in the President’s political philosophy (which Romney claims are statist – implying Obama seeks governmental solutions to every problem).  But the simple logic noted above provides a way of either appreciating or attacking the Republican’s argument.  If one were to do the latter, one could (for example):

* “Attack” the first premise by asking questions regarding what he means by “worse,” and do some research regarding how the economy has done as a whole during the last four years (rather than just focus on a few negative – or positive – elements within the economy)

* Presuming you accept the first premise to be true (and even if you don’t), finding historical precedent whereby a candidate who managed a struggling economy during his first term presided over a much more robust economy in the second (indicating that his first four years might have been spent delivering necessary medicine that paid off during the next four).  Since this description could apply to Ronald Reagan, this approach offers Romney’s rivals the chance to “turn the tables” on him by utilizing the experience of a Republican hero to counter the current Republican candidate’s claims.

* Not accept that the two premises lead to the conclusion by pointing out that factors outside of the economy (such as foreign policy) should also go into the decision of whom to vote for

In any speech about the economy, pathos is invoked by translating economic trends into direct negative consequences for Americans (a lost job, foreclosed home, loss of retirement savings, etc.).  It’s interesting to note that Romney does not use a typical device of naming specific people (sometimes pointing them out in the audience) who have suffered these negative consequences.  While he may have simply not chosen to do so on this particular campaign stop, it may be that this particular device (which can be effective in skilled hands) can come off contrived if the chemistry between candidate and audience is not there.

Overall, Romney’s appeal to emotion is evenly distributed between fear (the economy’s going south and it’s going to take you with it!) and hope (a different path can lead us out of the current quagmire).  And his appeal to hope links to more fundamental “good emotions,” notably an appeal to American founding principles and values.  So while pathos is in the ascendant in this speech, it would be a stretch to call it a simple appeal to fear designed to bypass reason by appealing to the worst in us.

Because Romney’s presumed rival is a more gifted public speaker, we’ll use President Obama’s stump speech (actually the announcement of his candidacy) to look at some important examples of political rhetoric