Blog 2 Ryan Kiefer- Opinion piece.

The major differences between the speeches of Obama and Romney were the methods of rhetoric. Of course they both used all methods, but Romney was much more focused on the ethos and pathos while Obama was more focused on logos. I believe that this is because Romney is a new candidate and people outside of his state don’t know much about him and won’t trust him as well, so he needs to build credibility and win the hearts of voters. As Obama has been president for almost four years already and most people are familiar with him, he can focus more on a logic based speech and talk about what his plans are in depth.

                It was important for Romney to establish a connection with his audience at the beginning of his acceptance speech. With his anecdotes and slow pace, he worked into his own ideas after his lengthy introduction. The main idea behind his speech was to get to the emotions of people, rather than their brains. His speech was very effective at causing a strong reaction in his audience because he was able to customize his speech for his rather small target audience. And that could be a flaw in his speech, only addressing the average Republican while Obama was addressing a much larger audience- the whole nation. Romney also had several rhetorical fallacies in his speech. He had a straw man when addressing women’s rights, he attacked Obama with the claim that he can’t be a good president without being a good business man, and he used fallacies in associating himself with prominent female politicians that didn’t really relate to him. Despite these fallacies, however, the majority of his speech was sound and valid, such as when he was discussing his support of faith, family, and community, backing up his statements with support from his own family and church life. Even the fallacies helped, as most people in his audience wouldn’t be able to spot them anyway and they did increase the pathos and ethos. Overall, I think Romney’s speech was better and better delivered than Obama’s because Romney reached to the hearts of voters and gained their trust, while Obama simply repeated what he did last year and stated the good and bad aspects of his presidency to the people that voted for him last election.