Palin's emotional appeal comes too late

As I have mentioned in my past few blog entries, it is beneficial to appeal to the emotion of the audience when trying to persuade others to agree with a certain argument. In the news last week I read that Sarah Palin introduced new proposals for special needs children that she "says the McCain-Palin administration would persue" http://www.foxnews.com/video2/video08.html?maven_referralObject=3161758&maven_referralPlaylistId=&sRevUrl=http://www.foxnews.com/politics/.

These proposals include giving parents withe special needs children more choice in what schools their children attend, as well as keeping federal funds with these children along the way. I think it is good the Palin raised such an issue because, as one reporter mentioned, it "might help her among some women voters." Clearly, these issues are not political issues, but deal more with the ways in which individual families are affected on a daily basis. In such a way, Palin is appealing to the emotion of the audience, which in this case is any family with a child who has special needs.

This newsfeed also mentioned, however, that she should have raised this issue earlier. In my argumentative writing textbook, the intensity of emotions is discussed. In most cases, the more intense an emotion, the more effective it will be in an argument. The textbook states that "Love tends to grow with time" (Crowley, 252). I believe this is true, and if so, it would have been beneficial for Palin to have raised the issue of proposals for special needs children long ago. Since it appeals to the emotion of many individual families, had Palin mentioned this earlier in the campaign, it only would have helped her because these families might have grown to love her over the course of the entire campaign. Now that she mentions this just days away from the election, it will be much more difficult for Palin to sway the emotions of the American public to vote for her, and love her, if they do not already.