Sarah Palin

The 2007 Vice-Presidential was at Washington University in St. Louis University. Random fact, my best friend from high school goes to Wash U and is in an A Capella singing group on campus. The group wrote a song about this years campaigns and upcoming elections. NBC's morning show crew was on campus the morning before the debate and the group got to sing on the show. So my best friend was on National Television for 1:42 seconds!

Anyways, the debate followed my friends prime time and the question was asked, "Due to the recent bailout plan, what promises that you've made are you going to be unable to keep." Sarah Palin did a great job developing and employing her use of pathos in addressing and answering this question.

First of all she created various feelings of repungence towards Senator Obama and his running mate Senator Biden. Occasions where she created this feeling often resulted through her emphasis of specific words while describing events about the energy crisis. She said, "THAT'S what gave those oil companies those tax breaks." She places emphasis and clearly pronounces that word that's while refering to Obama's vote for the 2005 energy plan which creates the idea that Obama was directly related to the problems that resulted from the plan. Therefore, by her use of a negative tone of words and emphasis on particular ones, she creates a feeling or mood of resentment towards senator Obama. The emotion that she has presented and created create a motivation for a reaction in the audience that wants to move away from Senator Obama and the particular ideas and issues that he stands for according to Palin.

She immediately follows this by describing how she had to break up the monopolies of the big oil companies in her state that resulted from the plan. She continues to place emphasis on particular words in this dialogue, particularly the words "I and my." At one point she says, "I had to turn things around, ... [and] I had to say, 'You know the people are going to come first. Taxbreaks aren't going to come to big multinational coorporations when they adversely affect people." This use of the word I is slightly connected to her use of ethos, but it has an overall pathotic effect. She creates a feeling of desire in the audience by her use of first person. People experiences of attractiveness or being drawn to Palin because she seems to have all the answers and to be doing the right things. Palin further builds on these feelings on the audience and in a way stamps those feelings with legitamacy by bringing in her own feelings about things that "adversely affect people." To the audience, the are the people. They are the ones that Obama and multinational businesses are surpressing. Therefore, a slight emotional patriotism seems to arise. The audience feels that by moving away from Obama and towards Palin not only will they be helping themselves, bu they will be helping the country and all the other citizens of the U.S. in the right directions.

Towards the end of her answer, Palin is able to further affirm the desires, resentments, and feelings she has created for the audience by displaying some of her own emotions. She uses a joke "How long have I been at this, five weeks?" to ethotically build pathotic feelings of humor. She creates an image of herself as a normal person, like the rest of the audience. This helps to further explain and legitimize her use of words such as "for the good of the country" and for the "people" because unlike the dull politicians, Obama and Biden, she is a person and knows what the audience is going through. She therefore creates an emotional feeling of connection and understanding in the audience to finish of her answer. Palins use of pathos is firmly evident in her answer, and it is exceptionally well developed.