Palin' in Comparision

I am out of ideas. Rhetoric in my life? Yes, it is everywhere, but I wanted to branch away from my typical strategy which is to analyze a situation that happens to cross my path by chance. I wanted to reach outside the box and snag something that I wouldn’t have encountered otherwise…so I typed into google, “Sarah Palin’s speech” just to see what came up.

              

                I’m not a picky person. The first result was the brunette ex-model’s RNC Convention Speech in 2008 during her campaign for the vice-presidency. I read the speech, and now I will point out a few of her tactics concerning ethos, pathos, etc. and impart my opinion on their effectiveness.

                 

                She points out John Mccain’s status as a war veteran right of the start, gaining pathos with the audience due our sentimental feelings about service members and sacrifice. She continues to build on this, aligning herself to him and building up her pathos with the audience by her proximity to John Mccain. She follows up on this move by mentioning her family and how her son Track is going to be deployed to Afghanistan. She uses the military and her affiliation with it without any artifice, and I think this is a useful tool, because she doesn’t address whether the military is good or bad. She just uses it as a spring board to try to connect those of us who are also affected by the U.S. military.

The section where she describes her “responsibilities” as the governor of Alaska to promote her ethos begins with a reference to something previously said about her in a negative way. “Community organizer” is not a term one would normally apply to a governor of a state. Because Alaska is so sparesly populated, one of the arguments against Palin was that the responsibilities she did hold were not comparable to say the responsibilities of the governor of New York. She says that she guesses she is “community organizer” and then rebuttals the implied slight by saying “except that you have actual responsibilities.” This is a completely ineffective way to argue that point. Everyone’s already said that the reason we think of her as a “community organizer” is because she doesn’t have the same responsibilities in magnitude as a regular governor. They aren’t saying she doesn’t have “fake” responsibilities.

Feel free to check it out. I wish her manner of speaking weren’t as informal, but I suppose that makes her easier to understand, which is sometimes a good thing.

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