Goal: Analyze Joe Biden's use of pathos during his answer to the first question.
Senator Joe Biden uses a large number of pathos after answering Gwen Ifill's actual question*, "what promises, given the events of the week - the bailout plan, all of this - what promises have you and your campaigns made to the American people that you're not going to be able to keep?".
Pathos used by Biden were mainly in relation to past budgets that he considered inadequate or profitable to the 'wrong' part of American society, including (in the first half of his answer), "$300 billion tax-cut ... for corporate America and the very wealthy", "another $4 billion tax-cut for Exxon-Mobile", "wasteful spending", and "$100 billion tax-dodge".
By using examples of failed budgets in the past and comparing them to budget plans proposed by John McCain and Sarah Palin, Biden causes the listening audience to subconciously connect spending failure with McCain, though McCain did not necessarily have anything to do with past budget failures. With the economy as shot as it is, most Americans are unsympathetic towards anyone they view as feeding their tax money to large, wealthy corporations while the rest of them are struggling to make ends meet just so they can afford to eat or stay in their homes. Using terms such as 'wasteful spending' after forging such a connection of failure and his political opponent in the audience's minds can also serve to anger the audience members and in all likelihood cause them to be much less receptive to opinions and proposals given by Palin or McCain.
In addition to those examples above, Biden also uses more hopeful phrases to instill a sense of compassion in his audience members to himself and Obama, such as "we cannot slow up on education ... because that's the engine that is going to give us the economic growth and competitiveness that we need, and we are not going to slow up on the whole idea of providing for affordable health care for Americans" when defending what promises he and Obama would definitely keep to the American people. While these may possibly also be considered facts by some, they serve to further endear the audience to Biden and Obama because they feel that both are going to put measures into effect to make both badly-needed ideas (better education and affordable health care) a reality.
I think Biden's most powerful use of pathos was "I call that unpatriotic. I call that unpatriotic." Not only does it serve to (hopefully) cause a sense of guilt in those who have been practicing taking their post-office box off shore to avoid taxes, but also instills a feeling of need for stopping this practice in the audience, which also makes them feel more confident that Biden and Obama agree with them that it needs to be stopped and would actually stop it.
*This is NOT a shot at Biden. I noticed that BOTH Biden and Palin did a nice job of giving a 3 second or non-existant answer to the asked question before going into their own speech about whatever they felt like talking about. :P
