CANDIDATES WHO LOVE TO PERSUADE. There have very few of them in my lifetime. My son Nick commented on my post about American Presidential debates: “Another part of my point was that they do lack the power of persuasion, and reasoning no longer has any relevance, only force of will. And I’m not so sure that’s a good thing. We’re no longer a weak nation that needs a ‘strong president’ historians love so damned much.” The candidates that come to mind as wanting to persuade are Hubert Humphrey, Jack Kemp, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton. Al Gore certainly, but only after he was a candidate for office. I can’t think of any others at the moment. One quick test of whether a candidate wants to persuade is that he would love to have more time to speak. Most candidates seem generally to me to be desirous of not making a mistake and of convincing all the members of the audience that the candidate agrees with them.
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I don’t know much about politics, but I can say that the high school debaters divided up along these lines as well. So many of them would fill up their time, but they’d do it by repeating their arguments without adding anything new. Or they’d explain their definition again, sometimes to the exclusion of all else. I always had to talk very quickly in order to get all my arguments and examples into the time limit.
I think most candidates would dislike to be forced to try and persuade anyone. I agree with you that they’re out to seem like they’re everything to everyone. Fence-straddlers are so boring.
In Little Women, after Meg and John are married (hope this isn’t a spoiler), he is reading his newspaper while she’s sewing. She’s trying to make up with him after a quarrel; so she tries to show an interest in politics, which is what he’s reading about. While he happily explains, she thinks to herself that politics is just a bunch of men calling each other names, as if they were school boys. Ahem.