Obama Pundit

by Hector N. Fertig

A technical point just to get my feet wet on this site…

I don’t think I would categorize Obama’s health care argument (limited to the Drudge article) as a straw-man fallacy as he never says that anyone else holds this position and only hypothetically ascribes it to “we” – though it is close. It sounds more like either a false dilemma or a red herring to me. He begins…

“Well, we are out of money now… If we don’t reduce long-term health care inflation substantially, we can’t get control of the deficit.”

Possible paraphrases of the stanza you quoted:

1. “There are only two possible options, my way or do nothing and here are the consequences of doing nothing.” – false dilemma (assuming there is a third option such as the one you already indicated)

2. “Let me give you an example of an extraordinarily bad approach to this problem…” – red herring (why bring up something like this that no one has suggested?)

By contrast, the stimulus package statement really does sound like a classic straw-man argument to me.