The Great Debate

I have never really been interested in politics, but for my argumentative writing class, one of my assignments was to watch the first of three presidential debates that was shown live on Friday night. To my surprise, I actually enjoyed it. I learned a lot by watching, such as many more issues and policies being discussed, but the part that I really thought to be fun to watch was that both candidates seemed very knowledgeable to me. Of course, I am no political science major, nor do I have any interest in politics, but as an unbiased viewer, I thought McCain and Obama did a nice job of presenting themselves and debating each other.

In my argumentative writing textbook, I learned that a topic is a term used to describe something that generates an argument. Additionally, there are two types of topics; common topics, "suited to any argument" (Crowley, 120), and special topics, "those that belonged to some specific field of argument" (Crowley, 120). Sharon Crowley also states that "rhetors need a good deal of specific knowledge to argue from special topics" (p.121). I think that McCain and Obama have a lot of specific knowledge about many different issues, which is what allowed them to debate so well on Friday. Each candidate seemed to know a lot about specific topics, such as McCain knowing the details of Obama's proposals, for example. This was very impressive to me, as I feel that most people use common topics in arguments because they have not built such a specific knowledge on one, or even many, subjects.