Presidential Foreign Policy Debate

Grace Clayton Political Communication Analysis of Foreign Policy Political Debate When watching last night’s political debate over foreign policy between President Barack Obama and Governor Mitt Romney, I would have to say that I was less impressed than at the past two debate’s conclusions. Last debate, although quite sassy and a little “in your face” was much more entertaining to watch for someone who only recently became interested in politics. This one, the two candidates were seated, which immediately brought a different tone to the debate (not quite as abrasive right off the bat). In my opinion, it seemed that Governor Romney was having a bit of an issue with some of his foreign policy arguments. For instance, he did make the flub of saying that Iran was Syria’s link to the sea when they don’t even border each other or that we wouldn’t take oil from Syria (which we haven’t done in many, many years [Fact Checker seemed to think around the time of Reagan’s administration]). Governor Romney attempted to bring the argument back to how we need to build a strong home economy. Also that we have been lacking in strength as a foreign power because of our weak leadership and economy. However, President Obama since he has had much more experience on the foreign policy had a lot of effective things to say about foreign policy. His ethos was much stronger in my opinion, again because he has the experience under his belt. The main goal that he was hammering was that his goal is to “Keep America Safe.” He also had an extremely effective pathos appeal during the debate speaking about the story of the little girl name Peyton who was four years old when her father died on 9/11 in one of the twin towers. The fact that Obama was able to take out Osama Bin Laden in his presidency invariably makes him extremely popular to most all Americans who were alive on the day of September 11, 2001 and experienced the tragedy. After Osama was taken out, Peyton was able to feel peace about her father’s death. As a viewer, the thing that was the most frustrating, and it is probably like this in all presidential debates, was that each candidate seems to attack the other on incomplete arguments. For instance, they will take a part of wha the other candidate said in one of their speeches as their official stance and disregard the next paragraph that explains it further. Said more simply, it seems that each candidate takes the other’s words out of context way too often. These are the things that I checked in Fact Checker. The phrase that Romney took out of context was Obama’s “Apology Tour.” Now, Romney says that Obama went to all of these Middle Eastern countries apologizing for how America has acted. When in fact, what he was referring to was when Obama was in Europe and talked about how America has not always appreciated Europe as a huge power but then in the next paragraph he talked about how Europe had been anti-American many times. He was not apologizing by any means. But also, Obama did this to Romney by saying that he was calling for troops to still be in Iraq. In his speech on October 8, Romney stated that he the withdrawal was abrupt and more could have been done, but never technically supported sending more troops over there. Again, like I said this was kind of frustrating to listen to (especially after looking up the facts)….I guess that’s just politics…☺ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/post/fact-checking-the-third-presidential-debate/2012/10/23/91dbdc4a-1c61-11e2-ba31-3083ca97c314_blog.html#pagebreak