Judging a policy proposal by the company it keeps: The Gore‐Perot NAFTA debate

On November 9, 1993, Vice‐President Albert Gore debated Ross Perot on the subject of NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement. That Gore triumphed in the debate and succeeded thereby in winning pivotal votes in Congress for NAFTA has been widely acknowledged by the news media. The argument of this essay is that, from a rhetorical as opposed to a dialectical or logical perspective, viewer decisions to move toward the pro‐NAFTA position on the basis of judgments of source credibility in the debate were rational. The essay proposes a conception of rhetorical rationality and illustrates a method by which norms of rhetorical rationality may be derived.