No, not what I'm saying. That would be a hard standard to meet.

If you allow someone to notice that someone sort of premise because the statement right after logically follows it, then he will realize this is how someone gets him to look stupid by making him say something he doesn't agree with.... so if something resembles a rational argument, he will take it as a challenge if his intellect, (even though it's not a match of wits at all, but if he lets it go down that road, not knowing where it may lead, it could turn out you use his next few sentences to contradict the argument he might want to end up making later, and that's not a risk he willing to take.)

So you can use rhetoric to talk about a subject, and kind of state your opinion on it, and then kind if think out loud and wonder what sort of thought process would cause someone to be really unamused with the rhetoric you find inspiring. Then he might suggest some possibilities... which gives you the opportunity to think out loud about how you might be able to apply that to your own life, and what steps you might take to avoid being painfully oblivious of your own biases that might cause you to say and do things that you'd never agree with if you actually stopped and thought about it rationally....

So I guess you might counter by saying "rational use of rhetoric to subtly make an effort at encouraging rational thought isn't rhetoric, but just the early stages of a larger rational argument."

Ok, fine. That's a semantic short cut to me but alright