![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
xiphiasYeah, my favorite major that I flunked out of was Speech and Rhetoric, and I still love the stuff. And I'd like to take a moment to talk about two things from the Romney/Obama election stuff, things that I think are really interesting.
One lovely thing that happened from a rhetorical point of view is that both Obama and Romney made a virtually identical error, which allows everybody to examine them from similar point of view. Both of them made a sound-bite friendly misspeaking which played precisely into the negative views that their opposition held of them.
For Obama, it was "You didn't build that." For Romney, it was "Corporations are people, my friend."
Both candidates were making perfectly reasonable points, simple statements of fact that everyone would agree with, although reasonable people can, and do, disagree on the implications.
In context, it's obvious that Obama meant, "You didn't build THOSE" -- meaning the societal infrastructure that allows people to create successful businesses, and Romney meant "Corporations are composed of people." You go a sentence back in what Obama said, and he's saying, if you built a company, you did so with the help of roads and police protection and universal education -- and you didn't build those things. If you go a sentence forward in what Romney said, and he's saying, the money that goes to corporations goes to people, to human beings -- everything that corporations do is for the benefit of actual people.
These are both completely factual, simple, accurate statements. You can disagree about what people should do about these facts -- I've got enough socialism in my soul to believe that the people to whom corporate money flows are generally part of the problem, and plenty of reasonable people believe that, even if business owners benefit from infrastructure, they bear an unfair portion of the burden of supporting them. But both statements are simply factual: corporations are created by and for human beings, human beings direct their actions, and the profits they make benefit human beings; businesses formed in the United States benefit from the infrastructure of the United States.
In context, both statements were being used to express support for things that the other side disagrees with. But OUT of context, both statements sounded EXACTLY like the most extreme caricatures of those positions -- and those are caricatures that the other side genuinely believed.
Obama believed that businesses have a partial responsibility to support their communities from which they benefit. But it came out as the caricature that business owners have no rights to their own work. Romney believed that corporations benefit their investors, who are actual people, but it came out that the government ought to support corporations themselves, in themselves, per se.
One lovely thing that happened from a rhetorical point of view is that both Obama and Romney made a virtually identical error, which allows everybody to examine them from similar point of view. Both of them made a sound-bite friendly misspeaking which played precisely into the negative views that their opposition held of them.
For Obama, it was "You didn't build that." For Romney, it was "Corporations are people, my friend."
Both candidates were making perfectly reasonable points, simple statements of fact that everyone would agree with, although reasonable people can, and do, disagree on the implications.
In context, it's obvious that Obama meant, "You didn't build THOSE" -- meaning the societal infrastructure that allows people to create successful businesses, and Romney meant "Corporations are composed of people." You go a sentence back in what Obama said, and he's saying, if you built a company, you did so with the help of roads and police protection and universal education -- and you didn't build those things. If you go a sentence forward in what Romney said, and he's saying, the money that goes to corporations goes to people, to human beings -- everything that corporations do is for the benefit of actual people.
These are both completely factual, simple, accurate statements. You can disagree about what people should do about these facts -- I've got enough socialism in my soul to believe that the people to whom corporate money flows are generally part of the problem, and plenty of reasonable people believe that, even if business owners benefit from infrastructure, they bear an unfair portion of the burden of supporting them. But both statements are simply factual: corporations are created by and for human beings, human beings direct their actions, and the profits they make benefit human beings; businesses formed in the United States benefit from the infrastructure of the United States.
In context, both statements were being used to express support for things that the other side disagrees with. But OUT of context, both statements sounded EXACTLY like the most extreme caricatures of those positions -- and those are caricatures that the other side genuinely believed.
Obama believed that businesses have a partial responsibility to support their communities from which they benefit. But it came out as the caricature that business owners have no rights to their own work. Romney believed that corporations benefit their investors, who are actual people, but it came out that the government ought to support corporations themselves, in themselves, per se.