Philosophical Clash During Presidential Debate

This article also comes from the NYTimes and can be found here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/04/us/politics/debate-a-clash-over-governments-role-news-analysis.html?src=un&feedurl=http%3A%2F%2Fjson8.nytimes.com%2Fpages%2Fpolitics%2Findex.jsonp

The article is written by Peter Baker and broadly covers the differences in both Obama and Romney's campaign styles and goals.

In the fifth paragraph Baker writes:

There was little of the overt nastiness that has characterized the campaign this year. Instead, the debate was perhaps as direct an articulation of the profound schism in this election as has been heard over the course of the campaign. The candidates spent much of the 90 minutes here at the University of Denver defining it in narrow policy details that may have bled some of the passion out of their arguments and made them sound smaller than they were. But at its core, the debate brought home a divide over domestic policy greater than any since President Ronald Reagan and Walter F. Mondale faced off in 1984.

This is particularly interesting because of the part where Baker observes that "...defining [their campaigns] in narrow policy details...may have bled some of the passion out of [Romney and Obama's] arguments and made them sound smaller than they were."

The irony is that in an earlier post I observed and bemoaned how debates heavily emphasize emotional aspects of their candidates' arguments, rather than the policy choices and the logic behind them.

This implies that Baker thought that more passion would have improved the debate. This then implies that the NYTimes, a large news corporation, thinks that more passion -- or emotion -- would have improved the Presidential debate.

A final implication in this sequence is that because the NYTimes -- as a representative of what the public wants to read in their news -- wants more emotion in debates, so do too does the public. And that disgusts me.