Like Scott McConnell, I didn’t notice anything remarkably different between Sarah Palin’s accent in this clip (skip to around the 1:30 mark) and the one she’s displayed over the past month-plus, though I’d take his concluding point a bit further: the notion that a woman who’s barely managed to put a coherent paragraph together unless it was written on the paper in front of her has been faking a frigging accent is one of the more bizarre ideas I’ve ever encountered, and indeed is one that belongs right up there with the suggestion that we still don’t know enough to confirm Trig Palin’s parentage. But that’s how the mighty fall, I guess: first they’re “asking some questions”, then they descend into the rumor-mongering depths of DailyKosdom. (Psst, Andrew – did you hear that Sarah Palin didn’t know that Lou Dobbs was a man?!)
That said, Palin’s accent is certainly a bit less pronounced in the clip from 1996, and the “you betchas” and other verbal tics are pretty much missing: but then again so is the crippling nervousness, and as will have been apparent to anyone who’s seen me get agitated (or drunk) and release my inner New Jerseyan in a way that reveals why I never thought the guys on Seinfeld talked funny, those annoyingly folksy quirks and other unfortunate habits that we’d rather keep beneath the surface have a troubling tendency to rear their heads when cool and calm are gone. Toss out the obviously put-on “Say it ain’t so, Joe” and ask yourself again which of the following scenarios is more likely: Sarah Palin successfully fakes a full roster of cutesy mannerisms but trips over basic sentence structure repeatedly, or Sarah Palin gets flustered under pressure and morphs into a silly Alaskan schoolgirl while she fumbles with substance and grammar. There’s no way for us to tell for sure, of course, which is exactly what makes this sort of suspicion-mongering so dangerously irresponsible: but no doubt McConnell is right that if it was the former, it would have been an extraordinary maneuver indeed.
UPDATE: More here.
Filed under: media/culture, politics
[...] lot has been said recently about Sarah Palin’s accent. As someone who studies the science of [...]
I don’t think she is faking the accent. That’s absurd. But everybody speaks differently in different contexts (talking to your opponent on the field or your opponent in the debate or your mom or your buddies), and I’m sure Palin has some control over how much the Wasilla accent shows. I don’t think she is trying to hide her accent, and I would guess that this was a conscious decision made not entirely independently of political considerations.
I agree. But then it would seem more appropriate to say that it was in the ‘96 debates that she was doing more to “fake it” than she is right now. Which is certainly what it sounds like if you watch to that clip.
But then it would seem more appropriate to say that it was in the ‘96 debates that she was doing more to “fake it” than she is right now. Which is certainly what it sounds like if you watch to that clip.
Agreed…although it may well be that neither is faking it. If speaking with less of an accent is second nature to her, as I suppose it is to most newscasters who grew up with a strong regional accent, then I would say that neither is faking it.
At times I could distinctly hear Joe Biden lull the pronunciation of his vowels – much in the same way Delawareans do. Not the Dupont-types from up north but the Rehoboth or Dover Delawareans – the working & middle-class folk many of whom are of good Swedish & Finn stock, Delawareans of yore.
I’m calling him out – Biden was pandering to this crowd. But nobody seemed to notice. Maybe nobody cared. There aren’t many Delawareans anyway, I guess.
There should be a law against speaking in inauthentic accents in a public forum. Bullsh*ting with an authentic accent is, however, permissible.
GB – Brilliant; I love it.
[...] Peter Suderman have both jumped on board the “fake folksiness” wagon, and as I said on Friday, I just don’t get it. Here’s Peter: … I think it’s clear that the folksiness [...]
Sullivan is STILL demanding gynecological records? What a dumbass.