How many times have we heard, “When a man is strong and assertive, he’s just strong and assertive. When a woman is strong and assertive, she’s a bitch and a ball-buster and shrill and a shrew?” Turns out, if the man is Barack Obama and the woman is Sarah Palin and the entity passing judgment is the leftstream media, the claim has some merit.
Northwestern Law professor Jim Lindgren has done a detailed analysis of the attacks contained in both acceptance speeches, and the results are something you’d never guess if you relied on the media for analysis. Barack Obama’s acceptance speech contained 22 attacks on McCain and other Republicans, while Palin’s speech contained 13 attacks on Obama and other Democrats.
Other than sexism, the difference in perception can be attributed to Palin’s attacks being “funnier” and more “pointed” according to the analysis.
Palin has also been tagged as “sarcastic” in delivering her speech, but the analysis finds neither speech particularly rich in actual sarcasm (saying the opposite of what you actually mean for humor’s sake). Lindgren counts three successive sarcastic statements from Obama and one from Palin (“after he’s done turning back the waters and healing the planet”). Were this attributable to merely misusing the description “sarcastic,” one wonders how it would be more highly misattributed as a characteristic of Palin’s, though.
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