Abstract
Sarah Palin is an ambivalent figure of American conservatism. This chapter attends to her rhetoric and oratory and proposes that we can understand Palin as a celebrity politician who played a significant role in the popularisation of the strand of conservatism that is known as ‘common sense’. The chapter identifies four topics as the key elements that participated in the construction of Palin’s commonsensical ethos: frontier authenticity, motherhood, conservative feminism, and anti-elitism. The chapter also analyses one of Palin’s most understudied speeches and demonstrates how Palin sought to utilise her visibility to champion common sense conservatism and ultimately its core tenet, unregulated market capitalism.
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Hatzisavvidou, S. (2018). The Oratory of Sarah Palin. In: Crines, A., Hatzisavvidou, S. (eds) Republican Orators from Eisenhower to Trump. Rhetoric, Politics and Society. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-68545-8_13
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-68545-8_13
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