College Writing for Politicians

We all should love it when a politician writes an op-ed.  It allows them to talk to constituents about a specific topic and lay out their argument.  What we should not accept is when their writing would fail in a college writing class.  Reading Bobby Jindal’s piece on Politico and Sarah Palin’s piece in the Washington Post made me wonder what kind of grades politicians got in writing. 
    The basic idea of persuasive and argumentative writing is a thesis with evidence to support your argument.  Unfortunately that idea is often forgotten in favor of the usual political attacks.  Take Bobby Jindal for example.  He says, “House Democrats are determined to try to tax and spend our way back to prosperity.”  This may be true.  But he provides no example proving his point at all.  He hopes that by saying, “the past six months have made that clear” his point is made.  I know that the federal government has spent a lot on the stimulus but I was under the impression that a large portion of the 787 billion dollars was tax cuts.  I wish the Governor of Louisiana had clarified the tax part of his statement.
    Towards the end of his piece, Mr. Jindal lays out bullet points of what the House Democrats’ plan for healthcare would mean for America.  He makes a few claims but I will focus on one in particular: “The quality of healthcare would diminish.”  He makes no attempt to even try to back this up.  This may be true but because of the lack of evidence, I cannot accept this as fact.  On top of the lack of evidence, there is a lack of clarity.  Would the quality of healthcare for the uninsured go down? Would the quality of healthcare for the rich go down? Would the quality overall go down?  The reader really does not know whose healthcare the Governor is referring to. 
    Now to Governor Sarah Palin.  Her op-ed talks about the cap and trade energy bill recently passed by the House.  She makes many claims without really backing anything up.  For example, she says when talking about the solution to our energy problem, “the answer doesn’t lie in making energy scarcer and more expensive.”  While it is generally accepted that energy would become more expensive under this plan, I didn’t know until I read this that it would make energy scarcer.  My understanding was that the idea behind this bill was to spur alternative energies, which one would think would lead to more energy.  Again, this claim really isn’t fully explained to the reader. 
    Even when Mrs. Plain tries to lay out evidence supporting her argument she fails.  She writes, “for example, the cost of farming will certainly increase,” when trying to prove that doing business will become more expensive.  This is a nice attempt but she is proving one claim with another claim that isn’t backed up. The reader has no idea why farming would get more expensive.  This claim may be true, but there is no evidence whatsoever to convince an impartial reader. 
    To sum up for all the writing professors out there, my argument is that we should read politicians’ op-eds the way an impartial grader would.  We should evaluate the arguments they make based on the evidence they provide.  Obviously in an op-ed, the writer cannot go into too much detail but they can cite research done or quote the piece of legislation they are writing about.  I can picture these pieces coming back to the governors with many red circles and notes saying “why” and “provide evidence.”  When we read an op-ed from one our politicians, lets try to judge it the way our professors would have.