Lets take a look at a debate... in this case, the Presidential debate. Yay.
First up: How to not ask a question & also how not to answer a question -click-
So the question was "Based on what you have said, and done so far, and what you would do starting in 2021, why should the American people trust you, rather then your opponent."
This question is in reference to what has been said before by each person, & whatever actions were done. Asking after this, a question of why people should trust you, and not to trust the other.
Breaking down the question this is one of emotion, of subjective nature - why trust you / not trust them. I would object to the attack of my opponent, the argument, not the person should be attacked. I could not say/would not say why not to trust them, however what argument could be given to trust me? Such a thing would be emotional in nature, far to subjective to answer, and thus I would object to this question. The moderator has asked a rather loaded and malformed question, nether person can answer without commuting at least one logical fallacy.
However, no one objected, and went forward to respond. (sigh)
Analyzing this will be rather subjective, because I am not dealing with anything but erratic dialogue here, the method is to knock down the opponent. I must try to judge if the words used are doing this, or not.
Joe Biden gave numbers of who has died. how many are currently dying. He then said his opponent said in reference to such numbers "it is what it is" this is I suppose Joe trying to give a reason why not to trust his opponent. I do not see this as being why I should not trust your opponent Joe, at best this is a reason to view him as cold hearted, perhaps, but trust plays no factor here.
Joe says of his opponent, "He has no plan" - well this is a better attack in terms of why I should not trust him, granted I do not know if this is true as its unargued for proposition, but at least you are trying to tell me why I should not trust your opponent. He then laments how long his opponent knew about C19 but did not take action - at least I infer this is what Joe is trying to do, its a bit muddled. "He said he didn't want to tell us because it would cause a panic..." , "You don't panic, he panicked" Joe says. Hold on there, Joe your saying that I should not trust your opponent because he was worried about the public panicking - okay fair enough - keeping information that could save lives might be a reason to distrust him, but I also see the value in not wanting to cause a panic in people, so that makes the person reasonable - perhaps in error, but not necessarily a reason to distrust someone. However your bit that he panicked seems that you are reaching, say what you will about your opponent but he has never panicked publicly that I'm aware of, so I am hard pressed to think he would panic privately, swing and a miss Joe. You claim your opponent did not have people in China do (X) - that might be the case, so okay, a reason to not t rust perhaps. I can't help but note that the moderator did not stop President Trump from saying "Wrong" at you, bad mod is bad. Mute yourself Mr. President! At last Joe gets into what he did or tried to do. So at last telling us we should trust you. "We should provide.." okay, so I guess your saying your opponent is not doing that/did not do that.
Overall I would rate this attack as sub-par. Why should we trust you? You gave us maybe one reason - you proposed doing something. Okay, how hard did you fight for that, did you tell the news, what actions did you take other then just proposing it in some meeting? Flesh out what you tired to do and what you DID do (if anything) but you never said why we should trust you, not really. Then go on the attack. Doing it the other way around (attack then talk about your positives) would work just as well, but it seems like you are making similar error to what Hillary did - not promoting yourself enough.
Back to President Trump.
President Trump fires back blaming China, then said he closed the country, saying that Biden did not want this. Claims a number of people agree that he did a good job. Blames fake news, and highlights that the press blames Trump, praises Biden. Mentions Swine Flu & how Biden failed during this.
I'd say this is a massive blow to Biden, the amount of times President Trump tosses things at Biden vs how many he had tossed his way, is simply stunning. The man can win an erratic debate if nothing else.
Back to Biden:
He talks about those lost, appealing to emotion, telling us we can't trust him - but no where does he nail this down.
Clip ends.
Biden lost here. Simply put, the goal of erratic dialog is to get to the deeper basis of the conflict, we know in this case that they both want to win over the audience, here they have been asked to knock down each other with words, no matter how I try to cut this, Biden simply is not doing this, and President Trump is. Of course, you can come to your own conclusion here, the problem with this whole thing from an analysis stand point is just how subjective all of this is, attacking each other in this way in my view, should not be part of any debate. Yet, far to many times it is. Who to trust? Well we did not really get that answer. Yet, what we did see here, is a man who can knock down his opponent with words better then the other, and if that is the metric of who wins, then I have to conclude that President Trump wins this round.
I just wish these debates were logical. Ah well.
