President Obama's Q&A

In the video, it was really shocking at how the two sides (President Obama and the republican representatives) approached certain topics. A lot of the representatives, if not all, tried to undermine Obama's credibility. The representatives ask questions in such a way that they will either use pathos to immediately believe that Obama does not care about the American people, or that he himself is incompetent to be president. President Obama instead counters with statements that attempt to show that he is credible, or that he does care. The entire debate reminded me of a game of pong: that the representatives attacked Obama, only to have him counter and start the game over again.

As soon as the debate starts, the first speaker instantly uses the appeal to emotion by talking about the little kid who's father is unemployed and states that it is President Obama's policies that have caused such the shortage in jobs. What is surprising though is that not only had Obama had no control over any policies as he had just become president, but also that the republican representative knew that fact and rather attacked President Obama regardless just to be able to attack Obama's credibility at the very beginning. This pattern continued throughout the debate; a representative would state blatantly untruthful facts in order to constantly attack Obama's ethos and make the president have to scramble in order to convince the American public that it was not the way the representative described. The debate seemed that it wasn't at all about the topics that were being debated, but rather just knowing that the American public would have second thoughts about his competence to be president. Specifically, it was when representative Jason Chaifetz of Utah constantly uses the phrase "you said... but you didn't" around minutes 23-25 to just show the degree of attacks that the representatives led the American public to believe.

These constant attacks led into my favorite quote from the debate however. President Obama states that "(politicians) need to close the gap between rhetoric and reality" (37:41).This quote describes how even as a politician, your success largely depends on how the public views you, but most of the time, the pretty words whispered do not mean that any change will occur. This is the general premise for the entire debate- that even though the republican representatives ask about specific policies, they are still just statements whispered by forked tongues.