The XX Factor: Slate women blog about politics, etc...

Oh, Bridget

From Nina Shen Rastogi, who is having technical difficulties:

Until now, the McCain family has kept their youngest child, Bridget, out of the public spotlight—in part because she's young (but not younger than Bristol Palin, we might note) and in part because, in 2000, she was used in a vicious smear campaign against her father. (It was suggested that Bridget, a dark-skinned girl adopted from Bangladesh, was the product of an interracial affair.) As one blogger notes, Bridget didn't even appear in a recent People photo shoot that featured her family alongside the Palins.

As a South Asian, I've always been interested in Bridget. But I respected the McCains' decision to protect her privacy and, in this age of adopted-child-as-designer-accessory, I sort of appreciated it. How upsetting, then, that the first time I've seen them really talk about her in a big, public way, it's to trade on her tragic past in order to buff her parents' image. I shouldn't be surprised—after all, there's been plenty of conflicting talk lately about how and when it's appropriate for candidates to use their children on the campaign trail. And everyone in a candidate's family gets symbolically trotted out at some point. But really, did Cindy have to lump her daughter in like that with a survivor from Rwanda? As if there's no different between the two? It seemed like a crass move—and, by all accounts, an inaccurate reflection of the family's genuine love for their daughter.

As a side note, someone has already been doing a lot of thinking about what Bridget's life in the White House might be like ...

Ann Coulter with Babies!

Dahlia's got it: what's depressing about Palin is that she represents the Ann Coulterization of the Republican party. That's what was tugging at my unconscious mind as I watched her spout the most vicious and irresponsible claptrap, with such a gleeful expression on her face.

Watching Palin was like watching a cross between Ann Coulter and Michelle Malkin-- only Palin accessorizes with babies. And she's got a governorship, instead of a column or a TV show.

I'm beginning to suspect that it's not just me, either. Palin offered red meat to the hungry GOP faithful, but not sure how her speech played with independents. Way too soon to really know-- but for what it's worth, a Detroit Free Press focus group wasn't too impressed with her.

Sarah Palin and The Devil Wears Prada

I haven’t posted yet on the Sarah Palin Show, mainly because it’s all just been too darn entertaining to stop snorting and say anything intelligent. Last week I persuaded a twentysomething family friend to tune into the Obama speech by telling her that political conventions were no different from reality TV. My young friend has been texting me with every new Palin-palooza, as astonished as I have been by how correct that assessment was.

But I do want to comment on this false idea: that just because Palin is a woman, she is also a feminist. Or that just because she’s a woman, her nomination is a feminist act. Or that just because she’s a woman, Hillary-mourning women everywhere will vote for her, inspired simply by sharing chromosomes with a candidate. As my nephews would say, nuh-uh.

Love her or hate her, Hillary wears standard-issue feminism proudly. It's based on the idea that women and men should be treated equally; that the odds are still stacked against women (and many others) in many areas of life; and that these structural issues—say, the lack of early childhood education or health care for all families—are problems we should address together, and in fact, can fix only together. That's why she got called all those nasty sexist things, like "hysterical" and "bitch": because she was trying to shake off the femininity box.

What Sarah Palin is pushing is something quite different. She's milking a kind of feminine chauvinism: I am mother (hockey mom? hot mama?), hear me roar. She's using womanhood and all its trappings to further her family and her career. Of course, many of us at least occasionally use womanhood to our advantage—can you do the Helpless Female Gaze and duck a speeding ticket? But Palin appears to have no interest in knocking down structural barriers to female (or human) flourishing. Contrary to what Anne said awhile back, Palin wouldn’t have been nominated without feminism; there just wasn’t a market for a female veep candidate until Hillary and the White House Project and all those tiresome discussions of unequal pay created that market. Now that she's nominated, though, Palin appears happy to reap that advance without expanding on it. Her gleeful meanness last night made me think of her as the infamous Queen Bee type, so brilliantly captured by Meryl Streep in The Devil Wears Prada, with its philosophy of I’m glamorous/you’re a germ. She’s got hers; you get your own, and get out of her way.

As an example of her anti-feminism, consider her line-item veto of funding to support teen moms, reported by the Washington Post. The project she slashed would have given "young mothers a place to live with their babies for up to eighteen months while they gain the necessary skills and resources to change their lives" and help teen moms "become productive, successful, independent adults who create and provide a stable environment for themselves and their families." It’s not that Alaska didn’t have the money for the project. Under Palin’s leadership, the People’s Republic of Alaska redistributed oil tax revenues, sending every one of its 670,000 residents a $3,200 payout this year. And in 2005, the state took in $1.81 in federal monies for every federal tax dollar paid by its residents, making it look like a welfare state. No, Palin was sending a clear message: Back off talking about my pregnant daughter, that’s my family’s business. Your pregnant daughter is on her own.

Palin stands for tribe-, class-, and biology-as-destiny, for letting pregnancy and poverty and group membership determine your life course. If you are dumb enough to let anything bad hit you, too bad for you. She may be a hit with the base, but she’s not gonna win over PUMAs or moderate women—at least, it hasn't happened yet. Having the right chromosomes is not enough to swindle all of the women all of the time. And I hope not most of the women at all.

Cheering for Juno

Mainstreaming the Mean Girl

Rosa, I couldn't agree more about the nastiness. What we saw last night was the mainstreaming of Ann Coulter, the normalization of the principle that it isn't bile when it's spoken by a pretty woman. Coulter has gloated, "I am emboldened by my looks to say things Republican men wouldn't." And even though the Post reports today that Palin's was a "masculine" speech—written before the final candidate was selected—it bore so very many hallmarks of a vintage Coulter/Ingraham performance. Susan Estrich describes the Coulter approach as a play "to the lowest common denominator of derision, labeling the hero a coward, her opponent a traitor ... she is about suspicion and exclusion," and anyone who pushes back is a member of the "liberal media elite" and a sexist.

I'm Depressed Now

I'm not surprised that Sarah Palin can deliver a good speech. In my opinion, anyone capable of handling five kids and ANY job and not ending up in the loony bin presumptively has at least the raw smarts and managerial skills to run the Oval Office. So take a smart, tough, capable, ambitious woman, put her together for a week with the smartest, toughest, most capable and ambitious Republican political consultants, and it's a pretty good bet you're gonna come out with a woman who delivers a powerful speech.

But what an unbelievably vicious speech!  The nastiness level was just sky-high (or gutter low). And though Palin certainly didn't write the words she spoke, she sure looked like she enjoyed every second of delivering those zingers. That speech wasn't meant to inspire—it wasn't about our better selves or what we might be able to accomplish, as a nation—it was all about rage, sarcasm, resentment,  mockery. And the crowd just lapped it up.

Should I be surprised by this? Probably not; it's the meat and potatoes of the conservative culture wars and standard fare at Republican powwows of the past couple of decades. But all the same, I expected better of John McCain, a man I've often liked and admired over the years precisely for his resistance to using that Us-vs.-Them playbook. This year, with Obama's message of inclusion and hope, and McCain at the top of the Republican ticket, I thought we might at last break free of that kind of nastiness—that politics of smallness, of diminishment and suspicion and resentment.

Silly me.

Sarah-nade

It was a great speech and she delivered it almost perfectly. She had one job to do tonight—persuade Americans that Barack Obama is a meringue, wrapped in a soufflé, served on imported bone china, and she did it well. And then she did it again. And again. The turns and the aphorisms and the all-out smears were delivered with a megawatt smile, which set her off from Rudy Giuliani, who simply looked to have been off his meds. They also set her apart from Hillary Clinton, who never managed to deliver a zinger without being blown back by the recoil. And if it’s small to go after community organizers, or people who are not “always proud of America,” or people with the misfortune to reside in cities, or people inspired by idealism, well so be it. She’s a small-town girl.

It’s a risky tactic: If your opponent is larger than life, strive to be smaller than life. Paint Washington, government, and the entire world stage in miniature, until it’s good enough to have been mayor of a town of 6,000, and, frankly, it would have been good enough just to have been a hockey mom. This is the view of America that scares the pants off most of our allies: That we are the view.

Cruel and Unusual

Wow, Palin is a pit bull with lipstick. Her speech was good with some killer lines—the one about "We tend to prefer candidates who don't talk about you one way in Scranton and another way in San Francisco" (or vice versa, I'm paraphrasing) will be hard to refute.

What struck me most, however, is how much the pitbull theme extended to the entire night: The whole tenor of the evening was more mean-spirited than any convention I can remember. The crowd laughed at the mention of Obama being a community organizer during Giuliani's speech—what I think was not supposed to be a joke but rather a throwaway credit—but I'm sure all those laid-off steelworkers that Obama was working with to rebuild their lives wouldn't think it was funny. "Proud steelworkers," as Palin pointed out that her husband was. It's pretty mean to laugh at someone trying to help those with the true misfortune of a layoff; it seems cruel and unusual that those they were laughing at are professional kin of Palin's husband.

Wow

Before the speech we were talking about how we would be judging Sarah Palin on the rather simple task of speaking someone else's words. But she transcended that. She brought an X factor (an XX factor?) that announced someone formidable had arrived. It's ironic that she was so effective in diminishing both Obama's record and his speechmaking, because her record is also thin and she turns out to be just as effective a speaker in her own way. Think of the week she's been through—she and her family have been made into a national joke—and yet she commanded the stage with steel and confidence. I thought it was very smart for her to use her knowledge of energy to take a tour of the world's hot spots as a way of saying she's capable of grasping more than parochial issues. And she delivered the Republican argument against Obama—he's written two memoirs but no major legislation—with brio, not a bludgeon. After this she will have to speak her own words in unscripted settings. But tonight was a knockout debut just like Barack Obama's at the 2004 Democratic Convention.

Sarah Palin's Political Eros

Sarah Palin loved being onstage, and people loved watching her love it. This was no Sarah, plain and tall. There was a palpable eros in the room at the RNC tonight, and not just when she made a subtle crack about the great "package" her union husband had offered her. To be clear: What made Palin appealing wasn't that she was pretty in a beauty-contest kind of way, but that she possessed a real charge as she spoke, a charge that derived from her palpable sense of enjoyment at finding her voice and being loved for it. She started off rocky, speaking in a high pitch. But as soon as she mentioned that she had a son going to Iraq, the shell cracked; she appeared to relax into her role, pursing her lips and having fun. What Hillary Clinton pretended to be at the end of her campaign, Sarah Palin is: a red-blooded Middle American populist. Or so you started thinking by the end of her speech. No wonder John McCain wanted to get onstage while she stood on it; it won't be long before Sarah Palin has her own equivalent of the Obama girl. 

Nor is it any accident, I think, that Palin found her voice, as it were, when she got into her spiel about motherhood. Palin did something I've always thought female politicians should make more use of: She used her authority as a mother—the vital center of many families, and the first authority figure many of us know—to coax Americans into seeing her as a "force to be reckoned with," as CNN kept putting it. While her platform may be undeveloped, her persona is not. It's actually more complex than we're used to seeing onstage: a combination of eros with tough love, motherhood with wifeliness, fierceness with friendliness. It's not a tack Hillary tried. Throughout, Palin made full use of the old power women had (as the domestic angel) while embracing fully the new power women want (as the boardroom madam). Ironically, she may have an easier time bringing what CNN called "toughness and femininity" together precisely because she never assumed at the outset of her adult life that she'd end up in a role like this. On-screen, at least, she's not divided in herself in quite the way that someone who agonizes over how to "balance" her life can seem. In the end, the night held two firsts: the sight of a VP candidate onstage quipping about foreign policy while her husband held the baby in the audience. And the glimpse of a novel problem for a presidential candidate: sexual tension with his VP.

The Sarah Palin Show

Why shouldn't a smart, gutsy hockey mom turned small-town mayor potentially run the United States? The McCain campaign has argued that attacks on Sarah Palin's lack of experience are sexism rather than legitimate inquiries; Palin took it one step further tonight by asserting that her service as mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, and its 9,000 souls is exactly the right credential, and that the U.S. Senate is the suspect line on a résumé. This should seem odd, since being a senator is John McCain's main qualification. But that's the sort of contradiction Palin simply strides past, chin ever up. The troubles of her kids are off limits, until there they are up onstage, to be celebrated. Bristol holds hands with her now-fiance Levi, the crowd goes wild for the whole clan, and "What a beautiful family," John McCain can say when he walks out onstage to greet them. The Sarah Palin Show is all about gumption and the right optics. Even McCain's awkward grin registers as a plus with Palin near to stand tall and personify true grit, as only a tough mom can. The Republicans even invoke Hillary as a sage for seeing through Obama during the primaries. And her advisers help them along by backing up some of the charges that the scrutiny of Palin amounts to sexism. It's as if the McCain campaign tossed a whole deck of gender cards into the air and turned them into confetti.

It’s Not About the Cake at All

Maureen, I suppose whether or not you find the Republican stance on abortion hypocritical depends on point of view. From a pro-choice perspective, yes, a commitment to banning abortion is government intrusion on a woman's body. If you look at it from the perspective of the unborn child, the platform stance is an attempt to recognize the sanctity of life for everyone, born or unborn.

Republicans, as a party, are not trying to ban birth control. (Yeah, I know there are some extremists out there. I don't like ‘em, either.) And I will defend to the death a woman's right not to have sex. But biology sucks. Blame God if you're religious; otherwise blame Mother Nature or evolution. Women have babies. Men don't. We trash our girlish figures and lose hours of sleep on those 2 a.m. feedings. It's not fair. Aside from birth control and abortion, there's no getting around it. Birth control prevents the creation of a life, but if you're pro-life, you believe that abortion ends one.

When Republicans say they don't want government intruding in their lives, it's because we trust people to make decisions that are sound for them, we trust people to take care of themselves. But when you're pregnant, you're not making decisions just for yourself. You're making them for another person. And believe me, I don't buy the load of crap that South Dakota is selling, that a woman who gets an abortion is terminating a "whole, separate, unique, living human being." No other "unique" person has ever made my back ache or caused my ankles to swell to elephantine proportions. At the same time, that "clump of cells" isn't going to turn into a watermelon, or a puppy, or a ficus tree. It's a human being.

Almost everyone, regardless of ideology, accepts some form of government regulation in their lives, largely in the name of protecting us. We accept speed limits and drunk-driving laws to keep us safe on the roads; we trust building codes to keep us safe in our homes and public places; etc. If, at the end of the day, a platform that respects the life of the unborn still represents a hypocrisy, well, then call me a hypocrite. It's a charge I can live with.

Having Your Cake ...

To expand on your point further, E.J., that outlawing abortion is also coercive, I've got a question for the GOP party faithful that I've been chewing over since I saw a Minnesota politician (I don't remember her name, but she was wearing a lovely light-yellow sleeveless dress) at the GOP Convention extolling the virtues of keeping government out of our lives. How is being pro-life and anti-government interference not wanting to have your cake and eat every crumb? It's a combo that's always seemed wildly inconsistent to me, and I was reminded of it every time this pol mentioned that "the government has no place in our private decision-making" (I paraphrase), receiving thunderous applause each time. I kept thinking of the pro-life part of the GOP platform, which to me is very much in my life and private decision-making since, in E.J.'s words, "it forces a woman to carry to term, whether she wants to or not."

I think that each side of the pro-life/pro-choice debate needs to concede that its preferred plan has limitations, and I'm sure that the Democrats have similar contradictions in their platform (which I'm also sure will be brought promptly to my attention). But wanting the government out of every facet of our lives, yet also wanting to mandate legally (by repealing Roe v. Wade) that no woman can ever get an abortion? You can't have it both ways.

The Rain in Spain ...

A guest post from XX reader, Nicole Beckton:

In thinking about Sarah Palin's first big national evening, I realized that one of the "benefits" of McCain's pick is his total control of—if not her image, that's now impossible—her policies, her ideas, all of her political substance. Because of Palin’s perceived lack of interest/indifference to serious foreign policy concerns and limited record of opinions on such matters, she is a dream pick for McCain because, unlike Joe Biden, who has thought substantively about global and domestic concerns for decades, Sarah Palin is a relative blank slate.

Palin is an ultra-conservative who seems likely (because of her lack of experience) to pretty much accept anything the McCain campaign tells her to think about foreign and domestic policy. In fact what she has been asked to do, in preparation for this evening, is to simply parrot McCain on every ideological and policy level: To not have a mind of her own, to not have come to her opinions on our most pressing problems through careful thought, reflection, analysis, or legislative action. She is clearly willing to do so. That’s why Lindsey Graham raves that “she's smart and she will learn over time.” That’s why McCain advisers have said that part of her appeals for him was that “he felt she would be able to be educated quickly.”
Palin is thus the attractive new face of neo-conservativism with no recorded policy thoughts of her own. As a woman, this is more insulting to me than the fact that they barely vetted her—although I'm disturbed by that too! I think they vetted her just enough to know they could control her big policy positions ... unlike Kay Bailey Hutchinson, Olympia Snowe, Meg Whitman, and other more qualified female GOP leaders. Simply put, it feels like they picked a woman with no record or opinion on tough FOREIGN POLICY positions ... but with extremely strong views on DOMESTIC social issues—all of which seems to me to say, she's being kept in her place.

Engaged and Underage

Linda's piece on Slate yesterday notes that the statistics on teen pregnancy show a grim reality for girls in Bristol Palin's situation. The numbers on teen marriage don't look much better. A 2001 study found:

If the wife was a teenager at first marriage, the marriage is much more likely to dissolve than if the wife was at least 20 years of age at marriage. ... After 10 years of marriage, 48 percent of marriages of women under age 18 years at marriage have disrupted compared with 40 percent of marriages of women who were 18-19 years of age at marriage, 29 percent of marriages of women who were 20-24 years of age at marriage, and 24 percent of marriages of women at least 25 years of age at marriage.

So will those wedding bells ring when Bristol's 17 or 18? It might make a difference. Of course, quickie marriages can work—see Rachael's parents' story below.

But how's this for unfair? We're discussing the odds that someone in Bristol's circumstances will end up broke, uneducated, and divorced, while everyone's drooling over her boyfriend. A New York blogger calls him "sex on skates." The New York Daily News rhapsodizes about "the handsome teen with a light dusting of whiskers on his chin—his dark brown hair curly and wet," calling him "ruggedly handsome" and "broad-chested." I guess I'm the only one who can't get past his almost-mullet.

 Update: The almost-mullet is gone! The McCain-Palin campaign must have made Levi get a haircut before letting him on the plane to Minnesota.

Whether Your Name is Palin or Larimore, Coercion Is Not Choice

Rachael,

Thank you for the moving story about your origins. Your parents rock! I just want to point out, though, that when your mothers' relatives were trying to coerce your mother into an abortion, they were trying to overrule her choice. Outlawing abortion is similarly coercive, since it forces a woman to carry to term, whether she wants to or not. Either one is the opposite of choice.

In unrelated news, when I broke things off with a woman I was dating last year—the first woman I'd mentioned to my family after I left my partner of 19 years—my father was very disappointed. He had metastatic cancer and wanted to see me settled with someone before he died. (Sorry, dad.) But he took a deep breath and said, "Well, just because you're pregnant doesn't mean you have to get married."

The joke was on him. I'm pretty sure I'm too old to get pregnant. 

EJ

Why I'm Rooting for Bristol Palin

Linda Hirshman has a thoughtful piece in Slate reacting to Bristol Palin's pregnancy and pointing out that no, no one wants their 17-year-old daughter to get pregnant. The odds are stacked against teen mothers, no doubt. But so many stories I read on this topic present those scary numbers, add a brief caveat that "of course there are exceptions, but" and go on to rail against pro-lifers for wanting to overturn Roe v. Wade.

If you'll indulge me for a few minutes, I'd like to hit "pause" and tell you about one of those exceptions. My mom got pregnant when she was 16. With me. Thankfully, it was 1972, before Roe, or we might not be having this conversation. Well, the rest of you would be. She and my dad had to get married in the little side chapel of their church, not at the grander main altar, because of her "condition." Before they even got that far, a few of my mom's cousins called a family meeting and decided my mom had to have an abortion lest she embarrass the family. I guess you'd call them pro-choice.

My mom finished high school a year early so she wouldn't have to juggle a baby and classes. She and my dad lived in a tiny apartment, and saved up to buy a modest house when I was 6 months old. (My first car cost more than that house.) My dad worked five days a week at one job, and on one of his days off, he'd work at my grandfather's clothing store to make the $17 they needed for the weekly grocery bill.

Eventually, my parents bought their own business, a mom-and-pop grocery store. It didn't make them millionaires, and it required a lot of blood, sweat, and tears, but they worked side-by-side for more than 20 years. They still found time to haul us to swimming practice and baseball practice and come to our games and help us with our homework. And they did well enough to put two kids through college, set aside a nest egg for retirement, and start college funds for their ever-expanding brood of grandchildren. More than 35 years later, they're still happily married.

Yes, my parents were an exception, very clearly. But today is not the 1960s or 1970s, either. Young women have vastly more opportunities in high school for sports and other activities that keep them busy and improve their self-esteem. Birth control is more readily available. For girls who do get pregnant, schools—both high schools and college—have more programs to help moms get their educations and support themselves and their children. Let's empower our daughters to make the right choices for themselves, to either avoid sex when they're not ready or use birth control when they do. And if all else fails, love them and support them and, if you're running for vice president and the world is going to find out, stand up and tell the world you're proud of them. Yes, it takes hard work, and it takes sacrifice. Are we not raising our kids—daughters and sons—to work hard, to put the needs of others ahead of their own when the situation calls for it?

Whenever we have conversations about Roe v. Wade, pro-choicers always point to how awful life is for women who keep their babies, how hard it is. Hirshman decries the Republican position on abortion as "cruel." But can't we please acknowledge that there are victims, and that the pro-choice position has its own brutal cruelty? Does anyone consider how many worthwhile lives are sacrificed? Is it worse to grow up poor or not at all? My own life is pretty damn important to me, and I'm thankful every day that I'm here.

So, while everyone else is snickering and making jokes about shotgun weddings, I'd like to wish Bristol Palin, her boyfriend Levi, and their child the best. It's not an easy job you have before you, but the rewards can be amazing.

American Wife

It was striking to see Laura Bush onstage last night after watching Hillary Clinton and Michelle Obama speak last week. Laura looked stiff and uncomfortable, despite her smiles; she swiveled her head almost robotically toward and away from the camera, and her eyes had the tight look of someone disconnected from what she was saying. A few weeks ago I was at a dinner party with some people from Texas who used to know Laura Bush pretty well—and who had liked her. They invoked the usual things people invoke when they talk about who the private Laura Bush once was: a funny, smart jazz lover. A sometime smoker who cared a lot about education. And they said the question all her friends kept asking was: How can she stand by and watch as her husband makes so many bad decisions? 

Curtis Sittenfeld's newly released American Wife, a novel about a woman named Alice Blackwell, aims to answer that exact question. Alice is based loosely on Laura Bush. She's a shy, bookish girl from Wisconsin who grows up to be the wife of a jokey born-again former alcoholic who runs for president only to launch a deeply unpopular war. American Wife didn't go very far, in my view, toward dramatizing the inner life of this woman. But it does make you think quite a lot about the peculiarity of being a first lady—an inherently passive role that is both simpler and more complicated than being Sarah Palin or Hillary Clinton-as-candidate. In the book, Alice asks herself, "If I believed I could have made a difference but instead remained silent, then how could I bear it?" Choosing silence at a moment when more and more women are choosing to find their voice on the political stage—and to some degree just succeeding in finding it—must have a special poignancy. Or maybe it's a special kind of complicity. The book did make me wonder what, in her case, I would do. On the one hand, I believe a marriage is a private space; on the other, I wouldn't be able to swallow my own feelings in order to "support" my husband without question in the public eye. I'm curious to know what other XXers think—are you sympathetic to Laura or not? Will the role of first spouse change over time, as more couples with "new marriages" take residency in the White House?

Polls and Palin

A guest post from Slate's and The Big Money's Jim Ledbetter:

The Sarah Palin narrative is incomplete and will likely remain so even after her speech tonight. Nonetheless, I perceive a nagging gap between the way the media is so far discussing her candidacy and the way that polls indicate it is being received. Palin IS interesting to women and even appealing; as "XX Factor" noted yesterday, women are discussing her and her family and her situation with great vigor and energy. The media is making legitimate efforts to capture those conversations, dissect, and analyze them. But there is next to no evidence that this interest translates into increased female support for the GOP ticket. Quite the opposite, per Rasmussen Reports:

If McCain's strategy was to reach out to women voters, however, thus far it hasn't been successful. The night after the announcement, slightly more women voters viewed Palin as the right choice for McCain's running mate, but now 41% say she was not, versus 36% who still believe she was a good choice. Forty-one percent (41%) of women say they are less likely now to vote for McCain because of Palin, as opposed to 31% who say they are more likely to support him. Women voters were essentially even on this question in the earlier survey.

 

Men still back McCain's decision. Forty-one percent (41%) say she was the right choice, while 37% disagree. Earlier, men favored the decision by a 43% to 31% margin. Forty-three percent (43%) of men voters say they are more likely to vote for McCain because of his choosing of Palin as a running mate, but 34% say they are less likely to do so. This is a jump in support from the earlier survey. But even a plurality of men (47%) say Palin is not ready to be president in the event of the 72-year-old McCain being incapacitated while in the White House, although 32% believe she is ready. Women voters by a nearly two-to-one margin believe Palin is not ready.

Now, ok, a sizable portion of both men and women are unsure, and all these numbers are subject to change. Still, I find it staggering that two out of three women say Palin is unqualified to be president, and that more women say the choice of Palin makes them LESS likely to vote for McCain, while more men say it makes them MORE likely. Three conclusions from this: 1) As Ann Hulbert and others have argued, the Palin choice may well have been aimed at conservative men, who find that she shores up the ticket's "values" credential. 2) There is a big difference between women talking about Palin—even admiring her—and women's desire to vote Republican. 3) The media in general has yet to figure out how to frame stories involving a nationwide female candidate whose chief political appeal seems to be to men.

The Cultural Canniness of John McCain?