On misleading rhetorical devices

Political campaigns provide astute citizens with an opportunity to reflect on the ways rhetorical devices are used in support of or against the various candidates. I wanted to point out a few such devices that are commonly employed in what I would consider a misleading manner. I'll post more of these if and when I think of them.

"GUILT BY ASSOCIATION" - McCain's attacks on Obama's association with the likes of William Ayers has been dismissed in some quarters as "guilt by association." That's incorrect; nobody is accusing Obama of being a terrorist simply because of his association with a terrorist. What Obama is being criticized for is the association itself. It shows bad judgment and an apparent tolerance for the repugnant things Ayers represents. Although it is a fallacy to treat a candidate as a criminal simply because of his association with a criminal, that doesn't mean the candidate's association with a criminal is irrelevant in evaluating the candidate himself.

QUOTING SOMEONE "OUT OF CONTEXT" - This argument is overused for the simple reason that ALL quotes are taken out of context. If there is any unfairness involved, it's not that the person's words were taken out of their original context, but that this in some way altered the words' meaning. Unfortunately, asserting that a quote was "taken out of context" has become sort of an automatic response whenever a candidate's own words come back to haunt him. Rarely does a candidate ever explain how restoring the words to their original context would obviate the embarrassing quality of excerpted version. Even when they purport to go to that next step, they typically invent "context" that doesn't exist, such as the notion that they were only speaking "hypothetically," or in the past tense, etc.

USING "FEAR TACTICS" - The charge that a candidate is engaging in fear tactics assumes that there's never anything to fear from the policies our political leaders may choose to pursue. That assumption is, of course, nonsense. People rightly fear war, poverty, and the loss of freedom, among many other things. To the extent that a candidate's policies pose a significant threat of bringing about such consequences, it is only appropriate that people should fear the candidate and/or his policies. Obviously, the fear may not be justified in all cases, but that's not the point. The point is that there's nothing intrinsically wrong with using fear tactics. Depending on the circumstances, appealing to the voters' fears may be entirely appropriate.

10/27/2008 update:
"NEEDING A REASON TO VOTE FOR THE OTHER CANDIDATE" - This comes up in the context of negative campaigning. The idea is that a candidate can't rely solely on negative campaigning but must also give voters an affirmative reason to vote for him. It's a clever-sounding concept, but it doesn't really make sense in a two-candidate race. Voters are often presented with a choice between two deeply flawed candidates. Assuming a voter is going to pull the lever for one candidate or the other (as opposed to not voting at all or writing in the name of his pet hamster), then demonstrating that Candidate A is completely unacceptable does give that voter an affirmative reason to vote for Candidate B. Moreover, even if the negative attack only succeeds in driving up the write-votes in favor of domesticated hamsters, that still benefits Candidate B enormously. If Candidate B can flip a potential vote from Candidate A to "Fred the Hamster," that's a marginal gain of one vote for Candidate B. Sure, it would be better to flip the vote from Candidate A to Candidate B -- net gain of two votes -- but that doesn't diminish the value of eroding Candidate A's vote totals.