Brandewie's Paragraph Revision

In today’s political climate repetitive language is reiterated to excess. Politicians, especially the candidates in this upcoming election, like to simplify the issues with repetitive language. Barack Obama and John McCain continue to harp on the message “Change” in his 2008 campaign. However, in many of these speeches they both fail to mention what facets of government he plans on changing and how they will change them. Both candidates, as in every recent election, have harped on “reforming” separate branches of the government. However, both candidates are rarely specific on what exactly they will reform. On John McCain’s website, a table shows his policy on all the issues including healthcare. All of the issues are stated in broad terms, and say nothing about how he will implement policies. To illustrate, he says that he will make health care more available and responsive for patients. This response on his own website to his policy on health care is not something concrete, rather the message that is extremely broad. In the presidential debates, Barack Obama has continuously said the same things about making health care more affordable and accessible without explaining action he will follow eihter. Unclear speech is used by many politicians to gain support from people without the people actually knowing what the politician’s plan is. In the presidential debate, John McCain has been the perpetrator of bad English. McCain was asked the question “where do you stand on the financial recovery plan?” in the first rounds of the presidential debate. Instead of saying if he was in favor of the financial recovery plan, he twisted his language to advocate how proud he was to see that the financial crisis was beginning to end. This kind of unclear, general speech has been the backbone to many horrific oppressive governments. Also, phrases such as “War on Terror” and “Weapons of Mass Destruction” have been used to over generalize many of our problems overseas. These powerful yet empty words incited support for the Iraq war even though in hindsight, they had no application to the war at all. These catch phrases might seem good to simplify the problem for voter, but they fail to explain the politician’s policy to solve the problem. For example, every president since Richard Nixon has mentioned the importance to end our “dependency on foreign oil.” Countless candidates have said they will lower our dependency on foreign oil, while America’s foreign oil consumption has tripled. Talking in general catch phrases wins votes, but does not attack the issues that need to be solved.