Last Presidential Debate

No one knows if it was because the debate came to foreign policy or if it was simply because it was the last debate before the elections, but both candidates were very vigorous and forceful Monday night during the third presidential debate. I found very exciting the way the debate evolved and very interesting the fact that both tried to contest the other’s arguments pointing some wrong statements and confusion which were said during the last few weeks.

Barack Obama was the first who attacked Mitt Romney concerning what he said before. He started by condemning Romney’s opinion about the Middle East: “I'm glad that you recognize that al-Qaida's a threat because a few months ago when you were asked, what's the biggest geopolitical threat facing America, you said Russia — not al-Qaida, you said Russia” and then continued to prove their main differences taking other sentences Romney said: “You say that you're not interested in duplicating what happened in Iraq, but just a few weeks ago you said you think we should have more troops in Iraq right now”. First, facing these attacks, Romney appeared calm but determined to perturb the President thanks to what hasn’t been done yet. He also corrected Obama concerning what said that “attacking me is not an agenda”.

Moreover, we could definitely see that Obama tried to be very organized and underlined that Romney is not clear and sometimes very confused about what he put forward.

What put definitely the President as a leader in the subject of foreign policy are the long experience he has in it and the several actions he did all over the world during four years. We could easily see that Obama was much more comfortable than his contender and he succeed made him even more uncertain thanks to a lot of attacks and statements showing Romney’s lack of foreign policy experience.

Moreover, when it came to the role of America in the world, Mitt Romney could be easily criticized concerning his policy in Massachusetts and the President started by pointing his vision of “small businesses”. I found the discussion about what the Governor did in his State very well led.

On another side, I have to say that I really appreciated how the President developed his strategy and explained how he is going to use the budget in priority to make people save.

From my personal point of view, another interesting part of the debate was concerning China and I felt Obama really good using irony such as “You are familiar with jobs being shipped overseas, because you invested in companies that were shipping jobs overseas”. I also think that he was good separating his and Romney’s values.

Finally, what I found the most efficient concerning Mitt Romney was that he tried to be sensitive, for example when he talked about Syria or when he admitted that Obama did a good job on taking out Osama Bin Laden. Moreover he kept talking about his youth: “I'm a son of Detroit. I was born in Detroit. My dad was head of a car company. I like American cars”. Nevertheless, I definitely think that Obama did a better job for the last debate pointing up the flaws of Romney’s program and planning the next years with America in the center of the world.

To conclude, I think, again, that Obama used a lot more ethos and logos and thus used more his credibility as well as facts and measures than Romney, who used more pathos and still tried to convince his audience about his reliability. Indeed, throughout the debate, Obama brought figures and refuted Romney’s propositions thanks to that. Nevertheless, we can say that Romney found a certain credibility in his job and that he knows how the business field works. But we saw that sometimes, it has been in contradiction with what he actually wanted to prove.