Debate Evaluation

The president candidate whose rhetorical devices I chose to analyze was Mitt Romney’s. Over the course of the three debates Mitt Romney uses various rhetorical devices, some helping and some hurting his campaign. Most of the rhetorical devices used during the Domestic Policy debate are re-used in the Town Hall and Foreign Policy debate. In the first presidential debate pertaining to Domestic Policy, Mitt Romney uses rhetorical devices such as diction, sarcasm, pathos, logos, ethos, euphemism, perspective, and analogy. In the second debate which was Town Hall, he uses rhetorical devices such as ethos, allusion, logos, perspective and persuasion. In the last debate that addressed Foreign Policy Mitt Romney uses rhetorical devices such as ethos, pathos, logos, argumentation, and euphuism.
In the first debate, Mitt Romney uses sarcasm by responding to President Obamas comment about his anniversary, and saying that the President imagined the most romantic place for his anniversary there with him. This is considered to be sarcastic because he knows if the president had the opportunity he would spend his anniversary with his wife somewhere special, rather than participating in a debate in front of thousands of people. Pathos was used when Mitt Romney talked about the people in America who he had conversations with at events that explained to him how they are struggling with finding jobs, and trying to maintain taking care of their children without jobs at all. One of the most emotional lines that Romney quoted from one of his supporters was: “Yesterday I was at a rally in Denver, and a women came up to her with a baby in her arms and said Ann, my husband has had 4 jobs in 3 years (part-time jobs), and he just lost his most recent job and we have now lost our home, can you help us”. This appealed to the emotions of the audience because they could have had sympathy for this women and her family in this tough situation they are facing.
Logos was one of the rhetorical