Searching for Presidential Rhetoric

“Civility prevails,” read the headline of the Spanish newspaper El País. “Walz and Vance embrace an endangered species: agreement,” reported the Guardian. Such responses to the recent US vice-presidential debate between Republican J.D. Vance and Democrat Tim Walz were a world away from those that followed the bitter Trump–Biden and Trump–Harris debates in the preceding months. In the hours following each of those earlier presidential debates, my mind drifted back to last November, when the senior rhetoric class I teach at a classical high school watched and analysed the presidential debate between John Kennedy and Richard Nixon held in Chicago in 1960.

The Kennedy–Nixon debate was the first-ever televised encounter of its kind between two presidential candidates. After watching it, one of my students remarked with a sigh: “We need politicians like that today.” He was not referring to the substance, but the style—both candidates took care to conduct themselves with civility, good faith, a spirit of service, and unmistakable competence. No matter who won, viewers could rest assured that an intelligent, qualified, capable, and mentally stable leader would enter the White House the following January. As a result, this turned out to be one of the closest elections in US history, with Kennedy winning the popular vote by a margin of just 0.17 percent.

But for American high-school seniors graduating this year, presidential debates have been filled with vitriol and invective since they were in kindergarten or first grade, when Obama faced Romney in 2012. Kennedy-Nixon is a reminder of a time when political discourse had a more civil and cerebral tone.

Like Vance and Walz, neither Kennedy nor Nixon divided the electorate into the real Americans and the rest. Neither implied that some Americans are pure and others stained. They did not demonise one another. They did not attack each other’s motives or character. Neither accused the other of lying. Many voters in 1960 were wary of how Catholicism would influence Kennedy’s judgement (he would become the first Catholic president), but Nixon did not make religion an issue. Nor did he bring up the fact that Kennedy came from one of the richest families in America. When he was 29, Kennedy had become the youngest congressman in US history, and he was seeking to become the youngest elected president in US history. But when Nixon was asked about his own past statement that Kennedy was naïve and at times immature, he responded, “I have no comment.” In short, Nixon let the issues facing the country be the issue.

Vance and Walz helped to keep the focus on the issues by using a technique recently dubbed “star-manning” by Angel Eduardo of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). While “straw man” arguments engage with a weak version of an opponent’s argument and “steel man” arguments engage with the strongest version of an opponent’s argument, the “star man” argument, Eduardo writes, engages “the most charitable version of your opponent, by acknowledging their good intentions and your shared desires despite your disagreements.”