Parsing Palin

Palin Makes campaign stop at Elon University, subjects speech to scrutiny

by Rebecca Wetherbee

Oct. 16, 2008

Sarah Palin at Elon University, Courtesy of The Pendulum

As Election Day draws near, Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin starts to get serious. In the previous months, she has developed a reputation as a real folksy, backwoods woman—thanks in part to the “real world” rhetoric for which she’s become famous. But at Palin’s campaign stop Thursday at Elon University, she only indulged in one “You betcha!”

It is no surprise that Palin is watching her words—she has attracted a good deal of criticism regarding her diction, word choice and grammar since she started campaigning.

Her speeches and interviews are peppered with colloquialisms like “you betcha,” “doggone,” “darn right” and gerunds with dropped Gs. She punctuates points with playful winks. It is as if embracing the American vernacular equates to embracing all American ideals, like the hard-earned success of Joe Six-pack and Joe the Plumber, the characters meant to represent average Americans.

Reaching the Common Folk

She is developing a rhetorical style that is unprecedented by the candidates of recent years, and its effectiveness has mixed reviews. “It’s plowing some new ground,” said Michael Strickland, a lecturer in English at Elon University. “It’s not just the language, it’s a method of rhetorical delivery—body language, facial expressions…You’ve got all the eye winks and the shoulder wags. That’s a very endearing thing.”

“A great deal of Palin’s speech focuses on maintaining and reinforcing an ethos that links her to the ‘common folk’ and represents the antithesis of what Obama has been constructed as: the slick intellectual,” said Tim Peeples, the associate dean of the Elon College of Arts and Sciences. “The winks, the references to ‘Joe Six-pack,’ the ‘you betcha’s’—these are all rhetorical ways of re-creating that ethos.”

So how well do her techniques fair with the average voter? “It makes her sound more like us,” said Amy Scott, a business owner who attended the Elon rally. “She’s not [like us], but it’s the closest we’ve had in a while.”

Relatability, however, is not a characteristic every voter desires. “They try to make her sound more like a local and an everyday person,” said Patrick Lane, a junior at Elon University. “It’s cutesy and I think it sounds contrived. I don’t want my politicians to be everyday people; I want them to be better.”

Friend or Faux?

But most of Palin’s followers believe that her speech is authentic and more than just a technique. “She’s purely herself,” said Annette Beeler, a broker. “I don’t think she puts on.”

David Chandler, a furniture designer, agreed. “She’s honest in herself,” he said. “She’s comfortable in her skin.”

“Some of [the rhetoric] is, of course, is amplified by her handlers to appeal to the much larger base that she’s going for right now,” said Strickland.

“I think it’s appropriate for her audience,” said Kelley Shannon, a vendor at the rally. “She’s playing to her audience, but all politicians do that.”

A number of the rally’s attendees were thankful for Palin’s natural ability to deliver a speech, especially since her party’s opponent, Barack Obama, is known for his eloquence and articulation. “When you have someone as mainstream as Barack Obama, and McCain isn’t a very good speaker, it’s nice to have someone who can speak to real people, to the middle class,” said Justin Loy, a nuclear inspector.

Amanda Duberman, a sophomore at Elon well known for her participation in College Democrats, acknowledged Palin’s positive influence on the McCain campaign. “She’s trying the whole folksy thing,” she said. “McCain’s having a hard time shoring up the base, and she does that with Joe Six-pack and all that.”

Public Displays of Deflection

Even though she makes speeches with confidence and poise, critics still accuse her of faltering when forced to make unscripted responses. Palin faced an enormous amount of criticism after her interviews with Charlie Gibson on ABC’s World News Tonight, Sean Hannity on Fox New’s Hannity & Colmes and Katie Couric on the CBS Evening News.

When put on the spot, Palin produced what some critics call “word salads,” or sentences which were completely grammatically incorrect, left thoughts unfinished and revealed little true meaning.

In fact, Tina Fey, a Palin look-alike and comedienne on NBC’s Saturday Night Live, inspired wild laughter from the studio audience after repeating, almost verbatim, Palin’s responses during her interview with Couric.

 

Kitty Burns Florey, an author and guest writer for Slate.com, decided to analyze Palin’s “word salads” in the most objective way possible: she diagrammed them. This excerpt is from the Couric interview:

“It’s very important when you consider even national security issues with Russia as Putin rears his head and comes into the air space of the United States of America, where—where do they go?”

The diagram of that sentence is relatively neat, but Florey’s design is much more convoluted when it represents how Palin avoids sharing her opinion of the Bush Doctrine during the Gibson interview:

“I know that John McCain will do that and I, as his vice president, families we are blessed with that vote of the American people and are elected to serve and are sworn in on January 20, that will be our top priority is to defend the American people.”

 

“To me, it’s not English,” said Florey in her blog, “Diagramming Sarah.” “It’s a collection of words strung together to elicit a reaction, floating ands and prepositional phrases (‘with that vote of the American people’) be damned.”

After breaking a sweat just trying to analyze Palin’s grammar, Florey is skeptical of Palin’s potential. “Do we really want to be led by someone who, when asked a straightforward question, flails around like an undergraduate who stayed up all night boozing instead of studying for the exam?” she asked.

Strickland, a careful observer of grammar in his own right, comes to Palin’s defense. “I’m not so sure there’s a direct correlation between intelligence and being able to speak articulately,” he said. “I do think it’s an important political skill. But it’s a skill and there’s practice involved.”

Strickland believes that Palin’s days in pageantry may be to blame.  Participants are trained to respond to questions without hesitation even if their responses cannot compete with the eloquence of a carefully crafted speech.

So, if a real, down-home candidate is what voters want, then they should look no further than Sarah Palin. And if linguists and grammarians are lacking in water cooler talk, then the McCain/Palin ticket should satisfy them, too.