"Long before the public struggle of Dade County began early in 1977, Anita Bryant had been fashioned and refashioned as a public figure, though not explicitly a political one. Of course, the politics of a certain brand of patriotism are there all along. So are the politics of gender. Once Miss Oklahoma (1958) and second runner-up for Miss America (1959), Anita began as a singer with a predictable mixture of patriotic songs, romantic ballads (In A Velvet Mood), and hymns. She joined the Bob Hope Christmas Tours to American soldiers overseas and sang frequently at the White House for LBJ- indeed, she delivered her signature song, the "Battle Hymn of the Republic," at his funeral. In the same years, she appeared in the Billy Graham Evangelistic Crusade. Then she began to write- her Christian testimony, of course, but also "inspirational" books, many with her husband, including a "Christian" program for physical fitness. Her husband did not author her Christian cookbook. In attributing these books to Bryant, I consent to a sort of authorial fiction. Many of her public statements, including her books, were ghostwritten by others, and there is internal reason to conclude that the most political books were pasted together by several hands from various sources. There is no need to decipher this authorship, because I am only interested in the character Bryant represents rhetorically- in Bryant as a papier mâché torso fashioned out of scraps of speech. I am interested in the rhetorical work, the extraordinary performance that this figure can accomplish despite the evident flaws in the speech assigned to it. Like Anita herself, the books overcome defects of form by the melodrama of their appeals and the menacing certainty of their convictions."