Rhetorical Rationality in the Gore-Perot Debate

Let us return now to the concept of credibility-related cognitive short-hands, referred to earlier. These, as I suggested, are rules-of-thumb (e.g., "follow the crowd"), often serviceable, that we tend to rely upon when we lack the time or inclination or ability to render carefully reasoned judgments on our own. In the Gore-Perot debate, character displays and attacks, presented in a context that made them exceptionally salient, were sufficient to prompt a reasonable listener to move toward the pro-NAFTA position.

In regard to context, during the protracted period of campaigning for and against the North American Free Trade Agreement, the American people had few of the usual bases available on which to make their decisions. For millions of Americans, party affiliation is a cognitive shorthand, but on this issue Democrats and Republicans seemed almost equally divided. Similarly, political ideology was not a reliable predictor of a Congressman's voting intentions or of a commentator or columnist's predispositions. Liberal Democrat Dick Gephart opposed NAFTA; liberal Democrat Ted Kennedy supported it. Conservative Rush Limbaugh supported NAFTA, Pat Buchanan opposed it.

Nor were the American people really in a position to make an intelligent decision on their own. The proposal before the Congress was 12,000 pages long--not something that average Americans were inclined to fuss over at their leisure. In the period preceding the vote, the citizenry was subjected to a great deal of evidence from allegedly unimpeachable sources, proving that the United States would both lose jobs to Mexico and create jobs through increased sales to Mexico. Good cases were made, then, for the politics of fear--and hope. But how was one to choose between them?

Confusing contextual cues and issue complexity, then, made character displays and attacks in the NAFTA debate all the more salient. This is not to say that viewers of the debate were precluded from deciding for NAFTA on its merits. If those who attended t he debate listened carefully, it would have been possible for them to hear Vice-President Gore make cogent arguments for NAFTA. NAFTA, said Gore, would lead to lower tariffs on American exports to Mexico, and this would bolster trade, thus increasing American jobs and profits. Twenty-two of twenty-three government-financed studies had forecast this. Moreover, NAFTA had the support of every living U.S. President, major Cabinet secretary, and Nobel Prize winner in Economics. Already, Mexico's pattern of unilaterally reduced tariffs had shown what NAFTA would do to improve the U.S. economy. (5) 

But, as the Wall Street Journal noted, very little of the debate turned on the "eye-glazing" details of NAFTA (Davis & Frisby, 1993:A6). Said Maureen Dowd (1993:B14), "the debate was certainly not a primer on the pros and cons of the complicated trade agreement with Mexico and Canada. It was a confusing blizzard of facts and figures, almost all of them contradicting each other. And whatever facts might have come through to the average viewer were overwhelmed by the nasty tone of the encounter." (6) 

The tone of the debate was nasty, but none of the political columnists I consulted was disposed toward blaming Gore. William Safire (1993:A29) summed up matters by saying: "Gore proved that a politician armed with courage and civility could beat a bully e very time." Following the Clinton administration's lead in identifying the anti-NAFTA position with Perot, the Wall Street Journal (Nov. 11, 1993:A14) characterized the movement and not just Perot as "mean-spirited."

Gore surely helped his own cause by appearing unruffled and even-tempered, resisting Perot's barbs and goads. At the same time, he effectively "shed his wooden image" (Davis and Frisby: 1993:A6) by repeatedly parrying with Perot. Particularly noteworthy w as Gore's response to Perot's charge that government forecasts could not be trusted; hence, that the many studies forecasting benefits to the U.S. from NAFTA couldn't be trusted. Gore reminded Perot that Perot too had tried his hand at forecasting. On "Larry King Live," just before the Persian Gulf war, Perot had stated that it was "a terrible mistake because it will lead to the death of 40,000 American troops." Perot had also predicted that on the day following Clinton's inauguration, "100 banks would fail, costing the taxpayer $100 billion." How credible, then, were Perot's attacks on the government's forecasts?

The foregoing was typical of Vice-President Gore's efforts to take the debate to Perot, making him as much the issue as the specifics of NAFTA. This of course is what logicians generally find problematic, at least as applied to policy debates. Gore accuse d Perot of seeking to gain politically from a defeat of the trade pact. He reminded Perot that Perot's son, as well as the head of Perot's business, and the head of United We Stand all supported NAFTA; moreover, that Perot himself "supported it until he started running for President and attempting to bring out the politics of fear." (7) 

Gore also accused Perot of covering up the amount of money he and his organization had spent in their lobbying campaign against NAFTA. He confronted Perot again and again on the matter of lobbying, reminding him (but without specific backing) that he had lobbied Congress to win special tax breaks for his businesses. Gore elicited a grudging confession from Perot that he was a partner in what Perot initially characterized as his son's airport project in Fort Worth. And Gore suggested that NAFTA was but an extension of the principle of free trade with neighboring countries undergirding the Perot family's airport project.

Walton (1989) has observed that the ad hominem can be powerful, even when logically suspect. Each of Gore's barbs was powerful indeed; their cumulative effect was devastating. In response to these charges, Perot became increasingly shrill and defensive. For example, on the charge that Perot was a partner in the Fort Worth airport business:

Gore: Now you say it's your son's business but isn't--
Perot: Now, do you guys never do anything but propaganda?
Gore: Isn't your business also--
Perot: Would you even know the truth if you saw it?
Gore: Oh yes--
Perot--I don't believe you would.

As Safire (1993:A29) put it: "Gore's red cape enticed Perot into insulting charges and insolent digs, which Americans recognize as a symptom of blown cool. The effect of this uncontrolled contempt was heightened by the matador's studied, boy-scout respectfulness."

Having thus far focused on instances in which Gore took the debate to Perot, I want now to turn to conflicts over turn-taking rights in which Perot contributed to his own undoing. Throughout the debate, Perot seemed preoccupied with what he claimed were G ore's violations of protocol. No fewer than seventeen times in the first half of the debate, he interrupted his own stream of talk to complain angrily that Gore had interrupted him. Most such complaints were accompanied by a pained look. David Rosenbaum ( 1993b:A1) saw the look as "affecting a kindly schoolteacher's forbearance for the class dunce." One reason, perhaps, that turn-taking rights assumed such significance in this debate is that it was one among a new breed of "conversational" debates in which time allotments per responses to questions were not pre-designated. In general, suggested host Larry King of CNN, he and his guests were going to "wing" it.

But Perot had had experience with the conversational style in two of the presidential campaign debates. Perot may also have seized upon the uncertainties surrounding turn-taking rights as a way of demonizing Gore while representing himself as a victim.

There is a long and distinguished tradition of "playing the victim" in televised political confrontations (Simons, 1994): Oliver North at the Iran-Contra hearings, George Bush in his 1988 interview with Dan Rather, and Judge Clarence Thomas at the Hill-Thomas hearings are exemplars. Playing the victim is not easy, and its success is by no means guaranteed. Each such effort involves a contest over perceived legitimacy--the actor risking his or her own legitimacy in the hopes of delegitimizing the opponent. Each involves the interactants in a miniature forensic drama, requiring of the self-styled victim that he or she appear appropriately innocent and hurt, indignant and outraged. When Judge Thomas cast himself as the innocent victim of a "high-tech lynching," he effectively shifted attention from his own guilt or innocence in his dealings with Anita Hill to that of the Judiciary Committee's. But his success was by no means foreordained. After all, the metaphor of a high-tech lynching hardly suited a Congressional hearing populated by nearly as many supporters as opponents, at which the principal accuser of a conservative appellate judge was another African-American. Still, Thomas gambled correctly that he would be able to pull off his act of victimage with out effective challenge (Simons, 1994).

Conceivably, Perot could have successfully managed the persona of the injured victim had he complained less frequently and less loudly, against a less competent adversary, and with a stronger case that Gore had violated his turn-taking rights. Such a case would have appealed to his audience's "folk sense" of distributive justice in turn-taking (Murray, 1988:32). It would have reflected the generally-held understanding that interruptions are not simply violations of turn-talking rules, but arise in response "to the inherent conflict between interactional norms which promote single speakership and normative pressures which are often satisfied only by flouting those turn-taking constraints" (Goldberg, 1990:886).

If, on the matter of interruptions, Perot had waited for clear and repeated evidences of violations before registering his first charge; if he had spoken more directly to his substantive points and been less long-winded; if he himself had not interrupted Gore on several occasions, and had not launched periodic ad hominem attacks on Gore's character, then Perot might have appeared to have a convincing case (Goldberg, 1990; Talbot, 1992). Correspondingly, Gore might have been more indictable on the charges had he appeared less the gentleman (Fraser, 1990).

But Perot assailed Gore from the very start and in a manner inappropriate to Gore's intrusion. Moreover, he spoke around NAFTA, not getting to the point of his own story until pushed. Their initial confrontation over turn-taking rights turned out to be typical:

Perot: -- here is what I see. This -- we have a lot of experience in Mexico. I've been accused of looking in the rear-view mirror. That's right. I'm looking back at reality, and here is what I see after many years. Mexican worker's life, standard of living and pay, has gone down, not up....[Perot goes on about deplorable conditions of workers' slums near American-owned factories in Mexico.]
King: Your agreement would have been a different NAFTA, right?
Gore: And I would suggest --
Perot: This would be a NAFTA that gives the people -- now, what are the rules here? Do I answer his questions or yours?
Perot's repeated complaints about being interrupted amount to a single argument: "I would have been able to make a clear and compelling case against NAFTA if only I were permitted to state my case without interruption. But the Vice-President has denied me that right. Therefore, the judgment on NAFTA in this debate has to be awarded to me on grounds of procedural violations."

Just as I have argued that a judgment for NAFTA follows in this debate in the context of Perot's discrediting, so, in equal measure, would the case against NAFTA have been bolstered if Perot's procedural argument could be judged meritorious. (8)  But, in addition to Perot's complaining too often, too shrilly, and without sufficient justification, Gore was too adroit an adversary to fit Perot's depiction of him as a villain. Not infrequently, he prefaced an attempted turn at talk with a request for the floor:

Can I say something about this picture?
***
Let me respond to that if I can because...
***
Can I respond?
***
Ok, now, I'd like to respond to that, OK?
***
Let me respond to that.
***
Let me ask you a question.
***
No, I'd like to respond on this.
***
Wait a minute, let me finish. This is important, Larry.

In this way he signaled his recognition that moderator Larry King was in charge, in effect undercutting with civility Perot's efforts at demonizing him. King, in turn, offered no more support for Perot than for Gore, calling upon them equally when there w as an issue of whose turn it was to talk. Long identified as Perot's favorite talk show host, King ended one especially petulant series of Perot complaints about being denied time with evidence that Perot and Gore had spoken in equal amounts. (9)