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A small point about the debate last Friday: Obama called McCain "John" routinely in the first part of the debate, switching to "Senator McCain" only after McCain pointedly refused to return the favor by saying "Barack," ever. In debators' terms, it was a clear win for McCain: He stiff-armed his opponent and took for himself more authority. As I was watching, I kept thinking Obama should stop, and then eventually he did.
But Saturday-morning quarterbacking by looking at the polls Rosa cites, I wonder if some voters in the middle read Obama's concessional speech patterns in a different way. LIke Obama's statements that McCain is right about various points, the friendly wave of "John" could be read as confident and magnanimous. Maybe Obama will be more aggressive in the next debate—certainly he'll hear lots of exhortations to move in that direction. But I wonder if these courtly overtures served a purpose, even if McCain is using it against him in the ad he cut before the debate ended. If nothing else, it says something that Obama came off as McCain's equal even while repeating, "John is absolutely right."
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So I thought McCain did slightly "better" in the debate than Obama. Like Dahlia, I thought Obama came across as wonky—he had trouble shifting from long, rather academic-sounding answers to short and punchy. I though McCain seemed folksy and confident while Obama seemed annoyed and sometimes defensive. McCain was aggressive; Obama was a little overly polite. McCain had a theme: "Me experienced, Obama naive." Obama—well, he was being too complicated.
But what do I know? The preliminary post-debate polls and focus groups suggest that most people saw something different in that debate. A CBS post-debate poll of 500 uncommitted voters saw 39 percent saying Obama won, 24 percent saying McCain won, and the rest declaring it a draw. And the CBS poll doesn't seem to be an outlier. According to the Financial Times:
A CNN survey of viewers said 51 per cent thought Mr Obama had won the debate, compared with 38 per cent for Mr McCain, with a big majority of women backing Mr Obama. In a Fox News focus group most viewers said Mr Obama had emerged the winner.
Same with the Frank Luntz and Stanley Greenberg focus groups.
Strikes me that most media commentators reacted as I did. But are we parsing these debates in a way that no one else was, making mountains out of too many molehills? (Or did everyone else just fall asleep halfway through the debate?)
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OK, I think I heard John McCain say, in his debate with Obama, that a) he was going to be voting for the $700 billion recovery plan ("Sure." Well, really, who knew?), and b) that if elected president, he would cope with the resulting budget squeeze by having "a spending freeze on everything but defense, veteran affairs and entitlement programs."
Lots could be said about this. (Obama: "The problem with a spending freeze is you're using a hatchet where you need a scalpel.") But what's bugging me is the notion that there is Only One Truly Special Group of People in the Country—only one group worthy of specifically exempting from an across-the-board spending freeze—and that's veterans. Naturally.
Don't get me wrong, veterans have put up with danger, hardship, and a great deal of general bureaucratic idiocy on behalf of our often muddle-headed country and deserve to have this muddle-headed country treat them with respect and concern. Overhauling and improving health, mental health, and educational benefits for veterans should be a national priority. But in a time of economic and foreign-policy crisis, should it be the only priority, aside from defense spending and maintaining entitlement programs? Really, John? Are programs that benefit veterans clearly more important than infant and child health programs? Than programs to prevent the further spread of HIV/AIDS? Than investments in critical infrastructure? Than increasing port security? Than early childhood education? Than improving first-responder capacity? Really?
I don't think McCain really believes that, but sacrilization of "our troops," and by extension, all veterans, has become standard in American civic religion. Beats blaming the troops for the mistakes and bad acts of their civilian commander in chief, no question—but it's not a particularly healthy state of affairs, either.
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I suppose the eternal mystery of this campaign remains that the same Barack Obama who is one of the most gifted speakers and writers of our lifetimes can manage to be such a bland, wonky, tentative debater. My own sense is that after watching John McCain careening around the country all week on the express train to Crazyville, bland and wonky seems kind of reassuring. I could wish that Obama would stop agreeing with McCain and praising his great leadership, especially after the ninth time McCain implied he wasn’t quite ready to trade in his pull-ups for the Batman underpants.
Still. Big props to McCain for stating that we “must never torture a prisoner ever again.” It shows that McCain—unlike Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Gonzales, Mukasey, Feith. et al—is sufficiently honest to admit that yes we have been torturing prisoners and yes it’s shocking. McCain has said this before although he also disappointed a lot of us when he declined to vote last winter to force the CIA to conform their interrogation techniques to the Army Field Manual (enabling the United States to officially ban torture while still retaining the ability to say, “I know a guy”). If both candidates for president can say aloud that the United States has permitted torture, and understand the significance of that for the rest of the world, it gives me some cause for hope. Not for war crimes prosecutions. I didn’t say I’m drunk here. But at least for some kind of moral reckoning when all this insanity comes to an end.
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It looks like the Sarah Palin rape-kit myth is still alive and flourishing. A reader sent along this editorial in the New York Times today by Dorothy Samuels decrying the policy and asking Palin to give voters an explanation.
Unfortunately, all this piece does is help perpetuate the myth. Thankfully, in addition to the blog posts I linked to in my first post about this, Jim Geraghty at the National Review Online has done his own thorough debunking, which I quote from below.
Samuels writes: "[W]hen news of Wasilla's practice of billing rape victims got around, Alaska's State Legislature approved a bill in 2000 to stop it." However, the Alaska state legislature did NOT pass the bill in response to Wasilla's policy of charging rape victims. As Geraghty points out, the bill came about because hospitals were charging victims.
Lauree Hugonin, director of the Alaska Network on Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault, spoke at several committee meetings. She noted in response to Smith's comment that while he had not found an instance where law enforcement has forwarded a bill, "hospitals have. It has happened in the Mat-Su Valley, on the Kenai Peninsula, and in Southeast, and that is why the bill is being brought forward."
Further evidence that the law was not targeted at Wasilla:
Yet in six committee meetings, Wasilla was never mentioned, even when the discussion turned to the specific topic of where victims were being charged. (The Matanuska-Susitna Valley, the surrounding region—the most densely populated region of the state, and roughly the size of West Virginia—is mentioned in passing.)
Samuels also quotes from an article in the local Wasilla paper that police chief Charlie Fallon didn't want to pass the burden along to taxpayers. That is an undeniably boneheaded and offensive statement. What she leaves out is his statement that he was TRYING to bill INSURANCE COMPANIES, not victims. "In the past we've charged the cost of exams to the victims insurance company when possible," is what he said. The story is old and incomplete. It doesn't say what Fallon would do if the insurance company rejected the claim. But the current mayor of Wasilla says there is no record of a victim being charged for a rape kit.
Lastly, Samuels claims that the Palin campaign has not addressed the issue and has released a statement saying only that "Prevention of domestic violence and sexual assault is a priority for Gov. Palin." However, Palin addressed this matter two weeks ago: "Palin spokeswoman Maria Comella told USA Today in an e-mail that the governor ‘does not believe, nor has she ever believed, that rape victims should have to pay for an evidence-gathering test.' "
I did make a small error of my own in my first post about this matter. I wrote that a quote from a Democratic legislator in Alaska that Palin likely didn't know about the policy brought me little comfort. I misread his quote. In fact, that legislator, Eric Croft, said he believed that Palin DID know what was going on, and he's helped smear Palin by saying that the legislation came about because of Wasilla.
I think we can all agree that victims should not have to pay for their rape kits. And billing insurance companies is a far from ideal solution. Reimbursing a victim with state money after she's already had to pay out of pocket is even worse. But it's a problem that's hardly been exclusive to Wasilla or Alaska. Fortunately, states have been quick to pass laws against such practices once word gets out.
But the fact remains that this is a nasty and untrue rumor about Sarah Palin that's been circulating for weeks. If you're an Obama supporter who gets frustrated that people still believe he's Muslim or won't put his hand on his heart for the Pledge of Allegiance, you should understand the frustration that Palin supporters feel when this slime is taken at face value.
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Because of the economic and political news, not much attention was paid to the speech by Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at the United Nations. The representatives of the United States and Israel left the room, but Ahmadinejad was embraced and applauded by other member nations for an anti-Semitic rant right out of Der Sturmer. This Holocaust denier who weekly predicts a second Holocaust for the state of Israel, warned the assembled delegates of the powers of sly, manipulative Jews: “The dignity, integrity and rights of the American and European people are being played with by a small but deceitful number of people called Zionists. Although they are a minuscule minority, they have been dominating an important portion of the financial and monetary centers as well as the political decision-making centers of some European countries and the U.S. in a deceitful, complex and furtive manner.”
There is much, much more. Here are three good pieces by Bret Stephens, Eve Epstein, and Anne Bayefsky on how such Nazi-style speech has become terrifyingly acceptable. I looked for a liberal commentator who might mention how chilling it is that a leader of a country seeking to become a nuclear power would so boldly speak of his desires for the elimination of a sovereign state and a people, but couldn’t find one. I did, however, see a defense of Ahmadinejad in Salon by Juan Cole, whose only critical words were for Barack Obama for condemning the speech. Cole finds the Iranian leader to be “quirky” and “colorful,” and says, by way of illustrating Ahmadinejad’s benign intentions, that if he really had genocidal fantasies, the Iranian regime would already have murdered the Jews still living in that country. In case that leaves you with any doubt about the regime’s desires, here’s an article about a march today in Iran in which tens of thousands chanted “Death to Israel” and a book was released mocking the Holocaust with illustrations of hook-nosed Jews.
(Photo of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, President of the Islamic Republic of Iran by TIMOTHY A. CLARY/AFP/Getty Images)
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E.J. and Marjorie: agreed. Palin is so bad in the Couric interviews that I'm embarrassed for her. I'm also struck by how tight she sounds. Her throat seems constricted, and her voice is pitched higher, as often happens when women get nervous. When Hillary Clinton let herself show emotion and said she'd found her true voice back in January, Meghan pointed out that Hillary suddenly sounded natural. The timber of her speech deepened with her rising sense of comfort. It's like the opposite is happening with Palin. And in terms of women's presence on the national political scene, it's not a good thing.
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E.J. thanks for sharing Katie Couric's interview with Sarah Palin. All I have to say is OMG indeed! If this election weren't so serious, John McCain's pick would be one continuing laugh riot. I have lost all respect for him, not just because of Palin -- although she's the icing on the cake -- but because he has betrayed every single one of his many stated principles. McCain may not want to "lose a war in order to win an election," as he said of Obama, but he is certainly willing to compromise on everything else in order to win this election including possibly placing the country in the hands of a vice-president who is sooooo not ready for prime time.
I love how McCain is now trying to get out of debating Obama on Friday after a bad week of press coverage and an uptick in the polls by Obama. What a cynical stunt that reeks of fear, desperation, and shameless political posturing. So a two hour debate is going to somehow cut into his time single-handedly solving the economic crisis between now and Friday?
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This is what happens when you try to turn your VP pick into someone, as Betty Friedan used to say, "fluffy."
“I am honored to meet you,” Ms. Palin said.
“You are even more gorgeous than you are on the (inaudible),” said Asif Ali Zardqari, new president of Pakistan.
“You are so nice,” Ms. Palin replied. “Thank you.”
“Now I know why the whole of America is crazy about you,” Mr. Zardari continued. At which point an aide told the two to shake hands.
“I’m supposed to pose again,” Ms. Palin said.
“If he’s insisting,” Mr. Zardari said, “I might hug.”
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Here's the interview on the economy, and here's the interview on foreign policy. Total viewing time is about eight minutes.
I am speechless. She cannot possibly be this uninformed. You absolutely have to see these for yourself to believe them. These are self-mocking; they could be SNL appearances. Tina Fey couldn't possibly improve on this.
This is why they've been keeping her under wraps.
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When I'd read that Wasilla, during Sarah Palin's mayoral tenure, had a practice of charging victims for their "rape kits"—the forensic examination required to gather evidence against the perpetrator—I was as horrified as anyone else. The explanation that it was the policy of the local police chief doing the billing, and even a quote by a Democratic member of the state legislature that Palin probably knew nothing about the policy, brought little comfort. At the same time, it just didn't make any sense, so I tempered my horror with skepticism.
Fortunately, it turns out that skepticism wins the day. Thanks to very thorough debunkings by bloggers Charlie Martin of Explorations and Bob Owens of Confederate Yankee, we can put this bit of nastiness to rest.
First off, the Wasilla police chief, Charlie Fannon, is on record as having tried to bill victims' insurance companies, not the victims themselves, for the rape kits. In other towns in Alaska, hospitals were trying to bill victims, prompting an Alaska state law forbidding the practice. If this practice still seems creepy or exclusive to macho, rough-and-tumble Alaska, well, it happens to be the practice in other states, too, like North Carolina (until recently) and ... Illinois.
Some conservative bloggers are trying to play "gotcha" and point out that Barack Obama co-sponsored a bill in the Illinois state senate that provides state money to cover services provided to victims who have neither state aid or insurance, meaning that Illinois also tries to get insurance companies to pay up, just like little ol' Wasilla. Best I can tell from my rudimentary reading of the Illinois code, Obama co-sponsored an amendment to existing legislation that already had the insurance clause in there, and the amendment had nothing to do with rape kits. So, I'm not going to engage in gotcha-ism. We could play that game all day long.
What bothers me is that, while the media has been quick to investigate and shoot down every claim that Sarah Palin makes—that she stopped the Bridge to Nowhere, that she opposes earmarks—the nasty rumors are taken at face value. It takes bloggers, working on their own time and with tools no fancier than Google, to figure out that she's not personally sending bills for $1,200 to traumatized rape victims and that no, she did NOT cut funding for teen mothers, unless you define "cut" as not providing as much of a budget increase as had been had asked for (same with funding "cuts" for Catholic Charities and the Special Olympics).
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At the risk of violating landlord-tenant confidentiality, Dahlia, I want to tell a story that may make you trust Campbell Brown on this.
I once had a new tenant moving into a small Adams Morgan apartment my husband and I owned as an investment. The painter had been a bit sloppy about spattering, and the new renter asked me to have him come back and clean up the now-hardened paint along the baseboard floor. I knew he would drag his feet on completing this chore, so I told the new tenant I preferred not to bother him. She looked at me straight in the eye and asked, "Is this how it's going to be, Bonnie?" My considered answer was, "No, I’ll come personally this Sunday and wash your floor," which I did. After that, Campbell Brown, then a young campaign reporter at NBC, was an ideal tenant, and she and I never had another problem.
I now picture Campbell looking Sarah Palin in the eye with a similar expression and asking her the same question, Gov. Palin, is this how it's going to be? and understand why the McCain campaign is trying so hard to keep them apart.
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Dahlia, my suspicion is that the McCain campaign doesn't really know what to do with her. They are afraid not that she'll say something stupid and embarrassing but that she'll say something too street-smart, or wicked, or aggressive. A woman with her reckless confidence might be appealing to conservative women but not necessarily to men. Based on nothing but my intuition, I'm guessing part of the reason the Palin effect is fading so fast is that they've tried so hard to turn her into a pet—adorable, as you say, but mute. So now she's fetching but useless. And who else could we blame but her male handlers? It can't possibly be her choice. One suspects she would love to take the liberal media on, given the chance.
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Campbell Brown is not the first commentator to claim that the McCain campaign’s monthlong muzzling of Sarah Palin represents “sexism” although she’s probably the most forceful. Andrew Sullivan has also railed against the sexism of the McCain campaign—which has more or less treated Gov. Palin like the Bush twins were treated—adorable but off-limits.
Not sure what I think about the tactic of blaming the boys for this, though. On the one hand it’s a clever response to the Palin trick of turning every quirk of every eyebrow into “sexism.” On the other, I can’t help but respond to it the same way Nayeli reacts to the grotesque “Declare Yourself” ads. Is this really about someone else’s choice to sew Palin’s mouth shut? Yuck. Why do we keep talking about women as though they lack any agency? Are we really going to condemn the McCain campaign for treating her as an object, with demands that they “free” her? I understand why smart women in the media are enraged with Palin’s refusal to engage them. It’s appalling. But I don’t think it’s good for women to direct that rage at her male keepers, handlers, or advisers, either.
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There is an amazing photo spread across this morning's Washington Times of Sarah Palin, shot from behind the head of Colombian President Alvaro Uribe. (Sadly, I can't find it online). Palin, radiating confidence, looks like she wants to ravish him, if not suck his blood. Now we got absolutely no actual information out of this foreign affairs speed dating. ("It was fine," said Hamid Karzai. And: "We talked a lot about a lot of things.") So we are not insulting her to say it was just an image building exercise. And the image conveyed by this photo, featured in a friendly conservative paper is: That is one MANSLAYING v.p. candidate we got.
This, plus the "Hottest VP" buttons, plus the action figure in a miniskirt, makes one suspect that conservatives are promoting the sexy Christian girl image rather than offended by it, as they claim to be.
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Dahlia, I'm of the school that we should be easy on Todd. The campaign's description of this controversy is, of course, absurd: they claim people are criticizing him for being "an active dad who wants to be with his kids and with his wife when he's not on the slope," says a spokeswoman in the Washington Post story. But of course no one in his right mind would criticize him for that. That's all just part of the "First Dude" mythology, where he does kamikaze races with a broken arm while holding a child in the other. People criticize him for those strongarming phone calls to city and state officials, for helping to write the budget when he's just as unqualified as his wife.
Still, the reason I think we should lay off is because it's high time for a new First Lady/First Dude standard. There is some part of us that clings to the notion of First Person as arm candy, even though we know that's a fiction. In life, we expect a spouse to stand up for his or her wife or husband, to support them even to the point of thuggishness. We even admire that at some level. And yet we can't bring ourselves to transfer that attitude to politics.
I'd much prefer a First Lady who makes bullying midnight phone calls than one who runs anodyne library fairs or plants flowers, which seems like the last vestiges of the mid-century housewife. Lady Bird Johnson was able to turn her gardening into a national green crusade. But now the First Lady as domestic goddess always comes off as an awkward fit. I'd like for there to be a space for a Hillary-style wife to run a health care task force if she's qualified to do that. Or even a Cherie Blair, competent but removed. And it's hard to defend a new model if we instinctively slam on Todd.
And yes, you're right, Dahlia, our ambivalence on this question shows through. We need no more proof than the recent Greta Van Susteren interview of Todd, which is truly one of the most excruciatingly awkward conversations I've ever witnessed. Talking Points memo ran a geniusly edited version.
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With today's dust-up over blocking press access to her meet-and-greet with foreign dignitaries, Sarah Palin reminds me ever-more of the vice president she is absolutely not meant to invoke ... Dick Cheney. She assumes the press has base motives and scorns its watchdog function--today's lesson was that print reporters and TV producers can't even be trusted with the handshake pleasantries. As governor, she prizes secrecy and loyalty among her aides. She hides her e-mails in a private Yahoo account. Palin's rationale may be different than Cheney's, especially when it comes to her treatment of the press. She has skated on thin talking points when trying to discuss foreign and domestic policy in the few interviews she's granted since McCain chose her, and that's not Cheney's problem. But if she makes it to the office of the vice president, might she prefer that it remain a closed box? It looks like the answer is yes. Even if that's not the fresh look the McCain campaign wants to promise.
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Ewww, Nayeli, I agree with you entirely: Those ads are creepy. Worse than creepy, really: They're advertising the sexiness of violence against women. Duct-tape her! Sew up her mouth! Dominate that chick! The voting tag line reads as an afterthought to the main message that rape is just soooo hot. Maybe there's a secret plan to bring out the misogynists while suppressing the women's vote?
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Why are pro-voting ads so frequently creepy? When seemingly oblivious celebrities express their views on the candidates themselves, the results can be entertaining or mildly insightful. But for some reason all of the stars' charm and charisma gets lost when they start standing up for our electoral system. These ads for Declare Yourself, which feature a gagged and sobbing Jessica Alba, Christina Aguilera, and Andre 3000 among others, are particularly frightening to look at. By the ads' logic, if I don't vote I'm essentially submitting myself to a brutal vigilante silencing technique, like having my mouth stapled or bolted shut.
Declare Yourself isn't alone in its tendency to threaten and alienate its audience despite better intentions. The "Vote or Die" campaign that began in 2000 promotes its own violent message, particularly when organizer P. Diddy gets aggressive or weirdly personal about the issues. Aguilera is actually a double offender in the scary ad game, having already taped this eerie display (those eyes! that smile!) for Rock the Vote last May. Not that Madonna's original Rock the Vote ads or Gwyneth Paltrow's stilted plug for absentee ballots were any more appropriate or appealing.
It's obviously important to get the MTV set involved in this election, and perhaps there's nothing better than a good shock to get this point across. The Declare Yourself ads' literal "use it or lose it" message is certainly attention-grabbing, but do these violent images really make people want to vote? They just scare the heck out of me.
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Today’s Washington Post offers yet another fascinating article about the many ways in which Todd Palin holds a quasi-official role in Sarah Palin’s political world. Last week’s piece on the CNN Web site similarly highlighted the blurry boundary between Todd Palin’s efforts to help out his wife with the childcare and, er, run the state of Alaska. Todd Palin was copied on hundreds of e-mails having to do with state business (Palin campaign spokeswoman Meg Stapleton is quoted explaining, "[T]he governor is asking him to print them off or take care of business.") Salon describes him as helping write the state budget and generally “lurking around” the statehouse. The New York Times has him gaily co-exercising his wife’s veto power and browbeating her subordinates over the telephone.
We all agree that Todd Palin exerts some significant degree of unofficial power over his wife’s administration, but no one seems to know what to do with that fact. We are definitely not subjecting Todd Palin to the treatment experienced by Hillary Clinton when she and her husband first unwisely tried to market themselves as “two for the price of one.” That scared the bejeesus out of America. But reports of Todd Palin’s broad involvement in his wife’s governing is characterized variously as benign stay-at-home fathering that somehow spills over into personnel matters or some kind of inevitable Alaskan brand of personal/political blurriness.
I keep wondering if overtly criticizing Todd Palin’s outsize role in his wife’s executive life runs afoul of the ever-blurrier Palin sexism foul line. You would think the opposite would be true: If Sarah Palin is being assisted by a powerful male with an uncertain portfolio and a hankering for secrecy, wouldn’t that sexism? I know we live in upside-down world these days, but isn’t it sexist not to worry that the reason Sarah Palin can so effortlessly do it all is that the first dude is doing a lot?
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Julia asked the McCain campaign about the actual cost of Cindy McCain's convention outfit and got no answer. Here's my similiarly cold-shouldered question, which a reader sent in via e-mail and I posed to the campaign a couple of days ago: What's Sarah Palin's history of domestic travel? Which parts of the country other than Alaska and Idaho has she spent significant time in or visited briefly? How much time has she spent in the South, the Midwest, the East Coast, and doing what? The McCain campaign can exaggerate Palin's foreign travel history while she disparages the notion that a record of meeting with foreign dignitaries is a good thing in a vice presidential candidate, I suppose. But what's the argument for not explaining how well Palin knows the different regions of this country—the one she says she is ready to run? Has anyone seen a good run down that I've missed?
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Leave it to one of my journalistic heroes, Sydney Schanberg, to uncover war hero John McCain’s really puzzling behavior toward those POWs who never made it out of that cage in Hanoi. Forget how many houses the guy has; this is important stuff. Schanberg’s devastating investigative piece, which appears in this week’s Nation, begins: “John McCain, who has risen to political prominence on his image as a Vietnam POW war hero, has, inexplicably, worked very hard to hide from the public stunning information about American prisoners in Vietnam who, unlike him, didn't return home. Throughout his Senate career, McCain has quietly sponsored and pushed into federal law a set of prohibitions that keep the most revealing information about these men buried as classified documents. Thus the war hero who people would logically imagine as a determined crusader for the interests of POWs and their families became instead the strange champion of hiding the evidence and closing the books.’’ What about it, John? I’d really like to understand.
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I'll see you and raise you, Julia; I don't give a rip how much Cindy's outfit cost. Of all the phony-spumoni windows into character, the gotcha of pointing out that presidential candidates and their spouses have done well in life, and thus have nice stuff, really does nothing for me. (It's not eating arugula that makes you an elitist, or wearing diamonds that makes you Marie Antoinette, either; Cindy travels around the world doing relief work, so case closed on that front.) I just did a piece on Michelle Obama for Reader's Digest, too, and I saw where one reader had posted a complaint that if I weren't such a crazy Michelle lover, I would have pointed out the damning fact that she wears $500 Jimmy Choos! And not only that, but she sees a personal trainer! OK, duly noted, but are we really voting on shoes now? In the race for worst-shod, I guess Ralph Nader would win. :(
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Speaking of feeling sorry for Cindy McCain, I felt a spasm of pity for the woman during the GOP Convention, when Vanity Fair’s “Politics & Power” blog published a post called “Cindy McCain’s $300,000 Outfit” claiming that one of her looks—the mustard-colored one, with the evil-countess collar—cost 300 grand. The sensational figure quickly got picked up by the Huffington Post, Talking Points Memo, the Los Angeles Times, even U.S. News and World Report; one HuffPo commenter railed: “THIS LADY IS PERFECT EXAMPLE OF THE 'LET THEM EAT CAKE' AND 'LATTE DA' MENTALITY OF BOTH THE BUSHIES AND MAC AND WIFE.”
But the claim—republished everywhere—was just a guess! Vanity Fair’s “fashion department” estimated prices for most of Cindy’s clothes and accessories, and said her earrings, if real, were three-carat diamonds worth $280,000. The sum is plausible for a pair of earrings that size (I called Harry Winston, which had a particularly high-quality pair on sale for a cool half-million), but every diamond expert I consulted, from Norman Landsberg in New York’s diamond district to Jim Shigley at the Gemological Institute of America, said it is impossible to estimate the size of a diamond—and even to tell whether it is synthetic or natural—from a photograph. “How would anybody actually know unless they had the earrings in their hand to examine them?” Landsberg said. “It would just be an incorrect guess.” One point of difficulty: Diamonds come in different shapes and can be broad but shallow, or relatively narrow but deeper, so it’s tough to accurately estimate carat size even if you can make a good guess about the diameter of a gem in its setting. The editor of Vanity Fair’s site, Michael Hogan, said the figures came from “a source who is a major player in the diamond industry” who “provided the estimates for the number of carats and the price.” But unless the source is the guy who sold Cindy the studs, the guess has a pretty big margin of error.
So: Cindy may well have been wearing jewelry that cost more than a house. (When Slate e-mailed the campaign to ask, it never responded.) But perhaps, conscious that her husband had recently taken flak for wearing $500 loafers, she opted for fakes. Or perhaps the earrings were a gift. Or an heirloom. Or something she bought years ago, for much less. The point is, we don’t know. Vanity Fair was candid that it was just publishing estimates, but that didn't stop the figure from ricocheting around the Web. The whole flap struck me as a new low in price-tag journalism—the already basement-level practice of reporting on the cost of political figures’ haircuts, glasses, and clothes. I understand our obsession with what politicians spend, but we shouldn’t bash Cindy for extravagance when we don’t really know the details.
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Wow, this Detroit Free Press interview with Elizabeth Edwards about John's affair is only the eighth-most e-mailed story on their site today; that Motor City must be one exciting town. The true lede of the story, about half-way down, is that she postponed getting a mammogram "for about eight years even after a benign spot showed up on a test. She blames herself, saying that like many women, she was too busy with her children's lives and was preoccupied with trying to get pregnant.'' Though I continue to think the world of Elizabeth and pray for her every day—yup, that may be the least Slate-y thing ever said on this site—that is some world-class denial and explains a lot. (About her marriage, I mean.)
On the other hand, denial is not all bad! She says straight-up that she is consciously repositioning her husband in their children's eyes, buffing up his image and legacy where they are concerned. Because they are his constituents now, and she wants them to see "their father being an advocate for poverty, not for this current picture of him to be the one they carry with them, as young people and as adults." (She also makes clear that if it ever was all about him, those days are over: "[T]he decisions I make are based entirely on what is the best thing for my children.'') She did graduate work in English lit before going to law school, and she's also using her considerable narrative powers to reshape the story she tells herself. Which is something we all do as life goes on, though rarely as dramatically as this: "It's an ongoing process of finding your feet again, retelling your story to yourself. You thought you were living in one novel, and it turns out you were living in another." From Jane Austen to Jay McInerney—ouch.
Asking whether she's "over'' the betrayal is not the remotely the right question, she says, and points out that "had her leg been amputated, instead of a child dying or her husband having an affair, people would not ask: 'Are you over that leg thing yet?' " But while she's working on that leg thing, "she finds comfort in 'Anthem,' a Leonard Cohen song whose lyrics she has posted in her kitchen. ... Reciting the words, Edwards said: "Ring the bells that still can ring. Forget your perfect offering. There is a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in."
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People who've never been in a Wal-Mart think she is parochial because she has never summered in Tuscany.
—David Brooks on Sarah Palin
When I read the part of Maureen Dowd's column yesterday that said she had "sautéed'' herself in "Sarahville" and ventured into a Wal-Mart to see how the other half shops, I figured she had taken the David Brooks Challenge. I also was picturing her at the superstore in Alexandria -- and even that I would have given a pretty to see, as my granny used to say. (Was she wearing sunglasses? Did an assistant approach the tattooed woman for her?) But if she went personally to the pray-away-the-gay church in Wasilla, that's a whole other field trip.
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When I sat down with Cindy McCain for Reader's Digest, the most dramatic thing was how changed she was from 2000, not only physically, though that's also true, but in her demeanor. I remembered her from her husband's first run as being a lot of fun—not in the "Guy walks into a bar ...'' sense, but she'd always seemed genuinely amused, which is about all you can be as the circus is passing by. In those days, she sometimes said true things, too—not anything wildly out-of-school, but that she'd never before spent so much time with her husband, and that any day John trotted out a new joke was a happy, happy day. Also, I must say that I admired her as a wife, for being so supportive and all-in. When my husband wrote a book that came out that year, I remember promising him that at Politics & Prose, I was going to be on my very best Cindy McCain behavior for at least five minutes, and look at him like he was the last piece of cake; I wasn't completely kidding, either.
Now, though, she seems like an altogether different person, someone I hadn't met before. As I say in the piece, she's been through a lot since 2000, so maybe that's it. But she does seem far more brittle, like she's been warned that if she says anything remotely in keeping with human experience, someone will come and do harm to her loved ones. Part of her is really strong, or she would not go on these humanitarian trips all over creation; I think that's probably the truest part of her, and where she can really be herself. Another part of her, however, seems just plain petrified, and maybe that's not an irrational reaction, either.
Anyway, Dahlia, to answer what you asked me, I am not usually an asker of very tough questions—go with your strength, I say, and I'm more Larry King than Tim Russert. (I was going to say I was more Baba Wawa, but she and the rest of the "View' crew were tougher on John McCain than anyone else has been this cycle.) Yet I finally did get so frustrated with Cindy's beyond-boilerplate answers—she's never seen her husband lose his temper, they've never had an argument, he constantly amazes her because he's "so young''—that I did, to my own surprise and believe me to hers, blurt out a question about whether the stories that he'd called her an ugly name were true, I guess just to see if it mattered what I asked. Her response: "Oh, no! Oh no, no, no! Oh please; you know something? No. But I—no, absolutely not; preposterous!''
She did go out on a limb and suggest that abortion wouldn't be a big issue for voters this year: "You know something? We have a war, an economy that's failing right now, we have people without homes and jobs, we have an immigration issue and those are the issues of the day.'' But she declined to say whether she agreed with her husband's view that Viagra should be covered by insurance, while birth control pills should not: "You'd have to ask him with regard to what you're talking about.''
And, here is what maybe should have been my lede: She has the shiniest legs I've ever seen.
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Hey Melinda! Reading your great Readers Digest interview with Cindy McCain today all I could think was: Can she possibly be as frail as she sounds? With the exception of the great tale of her rolling up her sleeves to singlehandedly balance the campaign’s books, it all comes across like she’s made of crystal, and reflects quite a contrast with Sarah Palin. Was it hard to ask her tough questions?
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If Sarah Palin turns out to be the next Ronald Reagan, then it will be up to us (with our BIG FAT RÉSUMÉS) to define the new mode of anti-intellectualism in America. One starting point would be a study mentioned in this week's Washington Post. Two political scientists gave volunteers who described themselves as "conservative" a list of Bush's prewar claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. To some of the volunteers they provided a thorough, neutral refutation—the 2004 Duelfer report that concluded Iraq had no WMDs. Now here's the amazing result: The ones who received the refutation were vastly more likely to believe the Bush view than the other group. In other words, the mere presence of "expert" refutation—i.e., an opposing view from people with BIG FAT RÉSUMÉS, as Sarah Palin calls them, made the conservatives less likely to believe the truth and stick to their guns. The researchers call this the "backfire effect" and say it shows up mostly with conservatives. Sending corrections to obvious mistruths, one of them concluded, is only likely to backfire. The very act of arguing against those corrections seems to make conservatives believe them more strongly and reinforces their view that anything from those people with BFR has to be wrong.
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Actually, I guess she lies down for indoor tanning—she apparently had a tanning bed installed in the Alaska governor's mansion. Palin's now the poster child for the Indoor Tanning Association:
While partisan bloggers and the sun scare industry will use this as an opportunity to undermine Gov. Palin and demonize the indoor tanning industry, the fact is that Governor Palin’s decision to get UV light from a tanning bed positively impacts her health.
“Moderate amounts of indoor tanning allow Governor Palin to experience the many health benefits that come with exposure to UV light,” said Dan Humiston, President of the Indoor Tanning Association. “Especially in dreary northern locations like Alaska, indoor tanning can help guard against wintertime depression and ward off diseases associated with vitamin D deficiency. Kudos to Governor Palin for standing up to dermatologists and other members of the sun scare industry who are trying to frighten Americans away from UV light.”
(Hat tip: Undiplomatic.)
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Noreen wrote a great piece about the shrewd public persona of Megan McCain. I agree that Meghan's response to her comment on the Today show was quick and effective. What I found more interesting, though, is something she said that same day on The View.
When co-host Sherri Shepherd asked if she ever regrets anything she says, Meghan said no:
"I don't believe in regrets."
However, after the media began discussing the Today show comment, Meghan responded on her blog:
"I regret my comments as they were delivered."
I'm not saying she wasn't entitled to regret or that she shouldn't have posted the clarification. In fact, I think it was critical that she responded because it was obvious she didn't understand the full meaning of the comment when she made it. Although she swears she never wants to run for office, she's clearly feeling the heat from the political spotlight. Maybe she's learning the hard way that talking candidly isn't always the way to go.
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While John McCain might have made the politically ill-advised move of voting against the equal pay bill, it’s nice to see he practices pay equality. Women in his office make $1.04 for ever $1 his male staffers make. And InstaPundit links to this blog post saying that Senate records show that women working on McCain’s Senate staff make more money than their counterparts in Obama’s Senate office.
I figured that it couldn’t be as simple as that, so I did some Googling, and indeed there is an explanation. But it doesn’t really help Obama very much. Turns out McCain has more senior staffers that are women. Per ABCNews’ Jake Tapper:
Only one of Obama's five best-paid Senate staffers is a woman. Of McCain's five best-paid Senate staffers, three are women.
Of Obama's top 20 salaried Senate staffers, seven are women. Of McCain's top 20 salaried Senate staffers, 13 are women.
Granted, it's a small sample size, so I don't think we should try to infer too much from it. It doesn't mean that Obama's a sexist pig or that John McCain is the most enlightened gent in the Senate. But it should quell some of the skepticism that McCain is "anti-woman."
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Torie, I also enjoyed the Saturday Night Live skit the other night but was thrown off by the word flurge to describe Hillary Clinton. I assume I'm not the only one. A piece in the Chicago Tribune reprinted a transcript from the skit with "flurge" in brackets. To me, that means they aren't exactly sure how to spell it, either. So, after coming up with a few alternate spellings and looking them up in Urbandictionary.com, here's what I came up with:
Flerg: 1.) The state of a man's penis when it is not erect.
2.) The foreskin of a man's penis.
Flurg: An unknown place, that is hard or unknown to define.
Flurge: A cross between flush and purge.
I also found a definition that drew a comparison between MILF (Mom I'd Like To F***) and FLIRGE (First Lady I'd Rather Get Elected).
Yet another definition comes directly from an alleged lesbian relationship between Huma Abedin and Clinton. FLIRG equals First Lady Is Really Gay.
While Sarah Palin is a sexy, beautiful hockey mom, Clinton is a gay, boner-shrinking First Lady. Interesting.
(Still image from NBC's Saturday Night Live season premiere, September 13 on NBC. Photo by Dana Edelson)
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As Melinda laments, people don't seem to care so much about experienced or informed in their candidates. Many who would consider refueling in Ireland a visit to Europe also believe Gov. Palin has sufficient international policy knowledge to be half the presidential ticket. That the untraveled VP nominee might soon need to rebuke both Putin and Saakashvili or stare down whomever inherits Kim Jong Il's nuclear stock pile evidentially has no more significance to many voters than if those responsibilities were challenges on Celebrity Apprentice. As long as the winner is smarter than a 5th-grader, Americans seem willing to be satisfied with the result. The American Idolization of democracy has apparently taken hold. But perhaps the distortions and tricky framing of the GOP campaign that lately resemble creative editing of reality TV writing are even more Machiavellian than they seem. I wonder if Karl Rove is secretly advising McCain to go "too far" in order to force Obama to go negative. (See, he can be as callow and politically manipulative as everyone else!) If so, personally, I'd like to see a daisy ad scare the voters back into reality.
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I've enjoyed exactly two Saturday Night Live skits in recent years. No. 1: the inspired "bitch is the new black" Weekend Update from way back, during the primary season. No. 2: This weekend's opening sketch, with Tina Fey as an oblivious Sarah Palin (of course) and Amy Poehler as a shocked-and-appalled Hillary Clinton. Together, they tackle sexism in the media. I've never been a fan of Hillary, but for a moment there, my heart broke for her. Watch here.
This sketch just might make up for the blahness of Fey and Poehler's Baby Mama.
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Karl Rove, the Conscience of America.
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So, does this mean that Bristol Palin has already been forced down the aisle? (On Facebook, she's Bristol Palin-Johnston now.) If so, I hope the Palin-Johnstons beat the odds. But if she was frog-marched into church on our account, I'm sorry, because like all women, she deserves better. And for anyone who sees marriage as a sacrament and a covenant, the idea of involving God in a campaign-season command performance is pretty shocking.
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Of all the newly revealed McCain camp lies, I think I love best the fact, as reported by Bloomberg, that they are evidently fibbing about crowd sizes at McCain-Palin rallies. I love it both because it’s so desperate—like inflating a movie’s box office—but also because the irony of the strategy here is so palpable: 1) Slam the Obama campaign for being a cult of celebrity. 2) Try to create your own celebrity. 3) Fail. 4) Lie.
Unlike the growing heaps of fabrications about Gov. Palin’s record—the bridge to nowhere; the earmarks; the trip to Iraq that never was; the trip to Ireland (“plain or unleaded?”)—we can actually attack the fake crowd stats without attacking Palin herself. The McCain camp has been chuffing ahead with all the lies, confident that they can make up whatever they want about Palin’s experience, and then attack anyone who questions that pretend experience as a raving sexist. Classic smoke bomb. But you can ask about fake crowds without being accused of assailing the Porcelain Pit Bull, right? Stay tuned.
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Update: As it turns out, Sarah Palin didn't actually visit Iraq - but she did see it, from Kuwait, just like she sees Russia from Alaska. (Hey, I saw Margot Fonteyn once - in Paris! Didn't make me a ballerina.) As the Boston Globe reported today, that whole been-to-Iraq thing was even more of a stretch than counting Ireland among the countries she's visited because her plane stopped there to refuel.
Know what, though? Even recognizing that McCain is an awfully high-mileage 72, I don't know how many McCain-Palin supporters will be put off by her lack of experience out in the world. And while I'm sure you're right, Rosa, to doubt whether Palin could pass a Foreign Service Exam, it will be interesting to see whether, even after everything we've been through, voters really care.
They were perfectly aware that Gore knew more than Bush. (In fact, I'm not kidding when I say that compared to Bush in '99, Palin was a regular Madeleine Albright with Charlie Gibson.) Yet voters held that against the know-it-all in the race, rather than the know-nothing. In '04, Kerry lost more points for speaking French than Bush did for knowing so little about the country we were about to invade that it was news to him that Sunnis and Shiites were from two different sects. ("I thought the Iraqis were Muslims,'' he said when this was pointed out to him, shortly before we went in. Which has nothing to do with intelligence; it's what comes of not caring enough to bother to learn.) After eight years of living with the result of such callousness, will we hold Palin to a higher standard? Perhaps so. But with familiarity about the world beyond our borders still considered suspect, put me down as not so sure.
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Rachael, you're of course right to say that "economic sanctions, diplomatic pressure, and reliance upon allies" are all perfectly sound methods for addressing foreign-policy crises in the abstract—and you're also right to note, in Palin's defense, that both McCain and Obama favor admission of Georgia into NATO and have spoken out against the Russian invasion of Georgia. That part of her response to ABC's Gibson on how to respond to Russian aggresison in Georgia was fine. But what appalled me about Palin's remarks was her casual "perhaps so"—not in answer to a question formulated as, "Would we have to assist Georgia" if Georgia joined NATO or even, "Would we have to defend Georgia," as you generously reformulated it, but to a question about whether we would "have to go to war" with Russia.
Legally, the NATO treaty doesn't require us to "go to war"—it just doesn't. If a fellow NATO member is attacked—in a manner satisfying the treaty terms—the treaty obligates parties to "assist the Party ... so attacked by taking forthwith ... such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area." In international law terms, "such action as it deems necessary" means, basically, diddly squat. Thus to say that including Georgia in NATO means that we might "perhaps" "have to go to war" with Russia if Russia "went into Georgia" is just plain incorrect as a statement about our treaty obligation.
Lots of journalists don't know this, but, OK, they're journalists, not diplomats, international lawyers, or people claiming to be ready to serve as commander in chief as of this very minute. But Palin is trying to tell us that she is ready to be commander in chief—right away!—if something should happen to McCain. She needs to know this stuff.
Fine, you might say, maybe in a technical sense there is no binding obligation to "go to war"—but wasn't Palin just acknowledging that in a loose sense, when you have a mutual-defense treaty, political loyalty alone might "perhaps" make us feel obligated to go to war with Russia if Russia "went into" Georgia, a NATO ally?
If Palin actually believes that—and frankly I doubt she does if she pauses for 10 seconds to think—then she has no business pushing for NATO expansion. Because no one in the mainstream of either the Democratic or Republican Party thinks that we should "perhaps" get into an actual "war" with nuclear Russia over Georgia's borders. And for that reason, no one ever, ever says that "perhaps" we'll have to go to war with Russia—because there is just no "perhaps" about this. We're not going to do this.
It would be—to bring back a phrase from not so long ago—mutually assured destruction. And we actually do not want to return to that era, which was far more dangerous than the current era. No one wants that. That's why there is some evidence that the Bush Administration quietly warned Saakashvili not to provoke the Russians over South Ossetia. Yeah, we like democratic Georgia—but not enough to risk nuclear war.
Reasonable people can disagree about whether or not to push for NATO expansion, whether or not to exclude Russia from the G8 and the WTO, whether or not to go as far as economic sanctions—but reasonable people don't disagree that the United States should not and would not casually pursue a policy that might "perhaps" lead us directly into a war with the world's other major nuclear power. (This is not the same thing as saying that the Russian action in Georgia is OK or not worth being very upset and concerned about—it's just a statement that neither political party actually thinks it makes any sense to contemplate "war.")
What troubles me is the utter shallowness of Palin's answers—in this case, a dangerous shallowness. She had obviously learned a few talking points. (NATO is a mutual-defense treaty. ... We want to include Georgia in NATO. ... They're a democracy, they "deserve" it. ... The Russian invasion was very bad. ... There must be consequences ... We can't let Russian just get away with this stuff. ...) But she had absolutely no knowledge or judgment underneath that. But saying "perhaps" we'll go to war is the kind of throwaway statement that, when made by a vice presidential candidate, has real-world consequences for future United States-Russia relations. It dramatically ups the ante.
We may never know, but I think it's a pretty good bet that when the GOP foreign policy experts charged with prepping Palin saw that interview, they said, "Sarah, you must never, ever say that kind of thing again—because if we win, we actually have to function in the world, and this ain't gonna help."
How would a pro have handled that question? Even the famously hot-tempered McCain easily could have handled it: "Charlie, for 60 years NATO has helped prevent and resolve conflicts in Europe, and that's what's going to continue to do when Georgia and Ukraine are members. We're not restarting the Cold War, much less a hot war. We want Russia to play the constructive role we know it can play—but we're also going to continue to work with our allies inside and outside NATO to make it clear to Russia that the territorial intergrity of sovereign states must be respected. We're going to stand by our friends, and send a crystal clear message to Russia that if it wants to prosper politically and economically, it needs to abandon this kind of inexcusable aggressiion. Specifically, we're looking at a range of mechanisms for sending that strong message, including making it clear that Russia's membership in the G8 and the WTO are contingent on approriate actions. ..."
Fred Kaplan got it right: Palin spoke with the "assertive confidence familiar to those who engaged in high-school debate competitions. But it was painfully obvious—from the rote nature of her responses, the repetitions of hammered-home phrases, and the non sequiturs that leapt up when she found herself led around an unfamiliar bend—that there is not a millimeter of depth undergirding those recitations, that she had never given a moment's thought to these matters before two weeks ago."
I'm thinking Chuck Hagel, Richard Lugar, and even Condi Rice are crying themselves to sleep.
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So, yes, as Rosa pointed out, Sarah Palin said that "perhaps" we'd have to defend Georgia if it were a NATO member. Here's the rest of what she said:
"The support that we can show is economic sanctions perhaps against Russia, if this is what it leads to," she said. "It doesn't have to lead to war and it doesn't have to lead, as I said, to a Cold War but economic sanctions, diplomatic pressure, again, counting on our allies to help us do that in this mission of keeping our eye on Russia and [Russian Prime Minister Vladimir] Putin and some of his desire to control and to control much more than smaller democratic countries."
John McCain and Barack Obama both support Georgia's entrance into NATO. Here's what Obama said when Russia invaded Georgia:
"The United States, Europe and all other concerned countries must stand united in condemning this aggression, and seeking a peaceful resolution to this crisis. ... This is a clear violation of the sovereignty and internationally recognized borders of Georgia—the UN must stand up for the sovereignty of its members, and peace in the world."
"I have consistently called for deepening relations between Georgia and transatlantic institutions, including a Membership Action Plan for NATO, and we must continue to press for that deeper relationship."
No, she didn't have a good interview overall with Charles Gibson, and that's a big hurdle for her personally. But, regarding Georgia and Russia, if suggesting economic sanctions, diplomatic pressure, and reliance upon allies to handle a foreign policy crisis is insane, well, the inmates are going to be running the asylum regardless of who wins in November.
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I'm intrigued by this interpretation, from psychology professor Jonathan Haidt on Edge, which Ann already wrote thoughtfully about, about why people vote Republican. Haidt points out that mostly liberal academic psychologists have concluded that "conservatism is a partially heritable personality trait that predisposes some people to be cognitively inflexible, fond of hierarchy, and inordinately afraid of uncertainty, change, and death." And then right when he is about to lose me, for seeming pat and condescending, he writes:
"our diagnosis of conservatism gives us the additional pleasure of shared righteous anger. ... Our diagnosis explains away Republican successes while convincing us and our fellow liberals that we hold the moral high ground. Our diagnosis tells us that we have nothing to learn from other ideologies, and it blinds us to what I think is one of the main reasons that so many Americans voted Republican over the last 30 years: they honestly prefer the Republican vision of a moral order to the one offered by Democrats."
and
"the second rule of moral psychology is that morality is not just about how we treat each other (as most liberals think); it is also about binding groups together, supporting essential institutions, and living in a sanctified and noble way. When Republicans say that Democrats 'just don't get it,' this is the 'it' to which they refer."
I don't entirely understand why Democrats haven't generally persuaded more voters in the middle that they're also about binding people together. That's what Barack Obama's community organizer past was about, and yet somehow that job description was treated as a bad word at the Republican convention. But I think Haidt's framing of the challenge is useful. And humble, which is a nice change of pace from all the campaign clattering this week. (More natterings from me about that here and here.)
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We still have about 150,000 troops in Iraq, and it's not clear how or when we're going to get them out. Meanwhile, our top military commanders are telling us we urgently need more troops in Afghanistan, where we've been losing ground and taking increased casualties. So this would be a great time to casually contemplate war with Russia, wouldn't it?
Of course it would! Today, we fire up the Cold War, courtesy of Sarah Palin:
Palin: [Ukraine and Georgia] deserve to be in NATO....
ABC's Charlie Gibson: And under the NATO treaty, wouldn't we then have to go to war if Russia went into Georgia?
Palin ALIN: Perhaps so.
(Hey, we're already in two wars—what would be so wrong with a third? Let's go nuclear this time!)
Sorry—but that's not taking a "hard line" with Russia. That's taking a naive, dangerously irresponsible, nearly insane line. Sane candidates trying to show they're "ready" for the presidency don't chat cavalierly on national TV about pursuing a policy that would "perhaps" obligate the United States to go to war with the world's largest nuclear power.
Just as Palin did not appear to be familiar with the Bush Doctrine during her intervew with Gibson, she didn't appear very familiar with the NATO treaty or what specific acts it might or might not require of the United States on behalf of an ally [the treaty requires parties to "assist" a NATO ally that has been attacked but does not mandate any particular form of assistance]. And she sure sounded like she'd never thought for more than a millisecond about the potential consequences of the policy she was urging, nor of the consequences of the war with Russia we might "perhaps" be obligated to undertake.
(Hint: not good.)
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Yes, Dahlia, you are absolutely right. We should STOP talking about the Lipstick Lady. Madame Governor really shouldn't be treated as a full-employment program for female pundits. (Check out Katha Pollitt's refusal to play this game here.)
And I will. I can stop. Really. I can!
Right after posting on this small point, which struck me late last night:
Yes, Palin may have energized and excited a constituency of Republican women who identify with her views and her approach to life. But she has also energized and outraged another entire demographic of women: those who oppose her politics and her approach to life. Lately I have been inundated with emails—some repeats, but most quite individual—from women who are appalled that the nonfeminist Palin could be put up to represent them and who are trying to figure out What To Do About It. From my inbox, it seems that liberal, progressive, Democratic, and feminist women's anti-Palin projects are springing up like mushrooms after a rain.
It will be interesting to see which group has more votes.
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There you go again, you pointy-headed Ivy Leaguers: trying to “understand” current events through the study of “history” (undertaken at Yale, of all places!). Sure, it’s fascinating to read about the Renaissance origins of the image of the mother-as-regent, fiercely protecting the husbands and sons who are really in charge of the realm. But isn’t it enough just to understand deep in our gut that Palin makes people feel, in some inchoate way … er, something vaguely positive about women and values and family and babies? Something warm and wonderful and maverick-y that inheres in her very person, independent of (indeed contrary to) any action she’s taken in office or any policy she espouses?
The smell of my daughter’s clean laundry makes me feel warm and wonderful about families, but I’m not electing a pile of it vice president of the United States. I’ve had it with hearing about Palin’s family. I want to know what the next administration we vote into office is going to do for our families—yours and mine.
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A guest post from Yale law professor Judith Resnik and Yale law student Allison Tait:
Sarah Palin as ferocious political mother-where have we seen her before, depicted with child (and an occasional dog)? In portraits on museum walls. Think Catherine de Medici. These are the 16th-century women who, as either queens or regents, reigned after the death of a man (their husband, the former king) and on behalf of their children. Barring exceptions like Elizabeth I, male heirs, not widow-queens, inherited the power to govern. But if the male heir was too young, his mother, as regent, had the power to rule. And once in power, these women sometimes plotted to try to keep it, while seeming to serve in a temporary and secondary capacity. Catherine de Medici acted as regent and adviser to three sons, effectively ruling France for almost 30 years. Fifty years later, Anne of Austria, the queen made famous in the Three Musketeers, challenged her late husband's will in order to claim exclusive power of the regency and broaden the scope of her powers.
By selecting Sarah Palin as regent-to-be-a heartbeat away from constitutionally holding the power of the president-McCain positioned her as the vibrant guardian on behalf of a candidate whose age raised questions. Palin is a coup because she enables McCain to send a double message: that women can be rulers but only temporary and secondary ones, more mom than monarch. (McCain, by the way, showed off at the convention his own lineage as son and grandson of admirals. Never mind that at the Naval Academy, he was at the bottom end of the class.)
Palin is playing the regent role to the hilt. The image of her holding her new son shows that she derives authority from motherhood and also invokes her particular Christian beliefs and opposition to abortion (provided through the back story of his birth). Palin's Christianity is much in evidence in other ways: See this New York Times article, which concluded that "her foundation and source of guidance is the Bible, and with it, has come a conviction to be God's servant."
This mixing of church and state also has an anchor in the Renaissance. As Princeton historian Theodore Rabb explained in his recent book, The Last Days of the Renaissance and the March to Modernity, during the 15th and 16th centuries, leaders looked to God for guidance and invoked God as justification for their actions. Modern democratic leaders look to facts, expert advice, law, and popular will. But McCain-Palin, like Bush, seek to entrench a modern version of returning to rule under the grace of God.
The other distinctive facet of Renaissance leadership was the glorification of war. From art to literature, it was the destiny sought by leaders. Rabb argues that the development of gun powder undermined that premise, as explosions of human flesh undid the romance of combat. Images of war's horrors, like Goya's corpses, displaced rococo portrayals of war's heroics. Yet in her acceptance speech for the nomination, Palin referred not only with pride but almost with joy at the war her son was soon to see. McCain went further by asserting that war had made him better-that he went away reckless and self-interested and returned committed to his country rather than to himself. But now we have not only too much gunpowder, but also nuclear and biological weapons. The right icon is Picasso's Guernica, reminding us that we should be far from these Renaissance notions of leadership and war, not reviving them.
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So I take my eye off Planet Palin for a half a minute—and by the time I get back, Dahlia has sworn off the stuff altogether, and the rest of you are acting like what Barack Obama said about lipstick is no big oink; are you kidding? I am so outraged, I am ONLY going to communicate in down-home phrases re: pigs from now on, in a kind of sarcastic solidarity with my fellow feminist John McCain. That'll show him how the hog eats the cabbage!
Seriously, I take all my cues on sisterhood from John, because who respects women more? That's why Obama'd have hardly anything to work with if he wanted to make an ad in response. Well, except for the footage of McCain laughing and then saying, "Excellent question'' when asked, "How do we beat the bitch?'' OK, and maybe that clip of the minister asking McCain if he really called his wife the c-word. I'm not sure Obama should rely on the 1986 story in the Tucson Citizen quoting McCain telling a joke about rape—even if it was a lot like the one that drove his buddy Claytie Williams out of politics. I guess if Obama really wanted to get down in the mud, he could reference the stripper McCain dated, or the gentlemanly way he behaved with his first—oh, who are we kidding?—with both of his wives. If Hillary's gotten over that—what's the word I want?—deferential joke he made about Chelsea, then who are we to go there? And it would be a total cheap shot to use the footage of him telling biker dudes of America that the mother of four of his children would make a great Miss Buffalo Chip. But John McCain, friend of the female? My friends, that would be a change.
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Amen Rosa. But I can’t help but think that every moment we spend talking about a vice presidential candidate who refuses to talk to us is a moment in which we fall into the trap of Palinography – the cult of obsessively telling and retelling Palin’s story in lieu of discussing anything that matters. A frequent Slate contributor emailed today asking what would happen if everyone here just agreed not to mention Sarah Palin again until she says or does something worth covering. Would traffic plummet? Or would readers agree that after 13 days of media navel-gazing (to which I have massively overcontributed, by the way) about whether and when and how we might talk about a (gasp!) female political candidate who can’t be bothered to talk to us is really quite enough?
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And she's still Sarah Palin.
Which is to say: She still opposes abortion even in cases of rape and incest but as governor cut funding for groups providing support to teen mothers. She still thinks it's OK to pretend she's always been a foe of earmarks and the famed "bridge to nowhere," though she liked both until it became convenient to dislike them. She still favors teaching creationism in the schools. She still doesn't think that global warming has anything to do with human activity. She's still confused about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. She's still someone who, until recently, hadn't "really focused much on the war in Iraq." (Though before the McCain campaign handed her a new script in late August, she, like most Americans, worried about "not knowing what the plan is to ever end the war we are engaged in.") She's still under investigation by an Alaska state ethics committee for misusing her official position to push for the firing of a state trooper who had divorced her sister (and she seems to have thought it was OK to trash her former brother-in-law in front of his child, to the point where an Alaska judge warned that such disparagement of a parent was "emotional child abuse.") She still took a state travel per diem during days she stayed in her own home. She still flirted for years with the Alaska Independence Party, a group with creepy links to Southern secessionist groups (and a group with a founder, Joe Vogler, whose anti-American comments leave Rev. Jeremiah Wright in the dust: "The fires of hell are frozen glaciers compared to my hatred for the American government. ... And I won't be buried under their damn flag.")
Oh, right, and her major qualification to be a heartbeat away from the presidency is still her two terms as mayor of a town smaller than many U.S. high schools, followed by 18 months as governor of a state with a population smaller than that of Memphis.
So let's not get distracted by swine fever.
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So Sarah Palin's oldest son, Track, was mainlining OxyContin, reports the National Enquirer, and ingesting many other illegal substances. His tour of duty was meant to get him away from all the partying, according to a string of anonymous friends. Some national hero. If Sarah Palin were anyone else, conservatives would be saying the obvious: pregnant teenage daughter, coke-sniffing son—well, what do you expect, when their mother works so much?
Actually, the Palin family is a psychological study in the impermeability of information. When someone has so deeply penetrated the national psyche, even our dreams, as my own husband confesses, no amount of fact-finding will change our impressions. Affairs, incest, dead grandmother in the closet. You get the impression it won't make a whit of difference. For some large portion of white women (including, apparently, Camille Paglia), Sarah Palin is the next American folk hero. It's like trying to truth-squad Daniel Boone. Who cares about the details?
One of my many depressed Obama-supporting friends suggests a tidy solution: Repeal the 19th Amendment.
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Just to clarify my post from last night that brought attention to Obama's "lipstick on a pig" comment, I was merely pointing out that Obama said something silly and might come to regret it. Which he probably is today, because, as John Dickerson pointed out, he's spending today dealing with it, one more day he's not getting his own message out. I think it's obvious he didn't do it intentionally—if he did, he's not as smart as I've always thought he was—and, to answer your question, Dana, I don't find the phrase even remotely sexist.
He made a gaffe, as all politicians are prone to do, and here's why: Less than a week ago, Sarah Palin stood before the nation and called herself a pit bull in lipstick. It was the signature line in her speech, and it's now part of her identity. So when Obama stood up on that stage and said that McCain and Palin's call for change was "just calling the same thing something different. But you know you can't, you know you can put lipstick on a pig, it's still a pig"—well, the only thing people heard was "lipstick."
So, like Mike Huckabee, I'm going to give Obama a pass on the grounds that it wasn't intentional. At the same time, I don't blame the McCain camp for taking advantage of it, though I do wish they had toned down the outrage just a wee bit.
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I agree with John Dickerson about the silliness of the McCain campaign getting all outraged over Obama's alleged "sexism." Their ticket is of a warrior and frontierswoman. They undercut their own case with their quickie video whining that Sarah Palin is a victim, of all things. But I'd be more willing to buy Obama's surprise as to how his lipstick remark was taken (and it was clear the crowd heard it as a Palin reference) if he hadn't also referred to McCain's ideas as "old fish" wrapped in paper. Surely Obama understands the use and misuse of coded language.
Aside from lipstick, there are two stories on Drudge today that may help explain why Democrats have such a hard time winning the White House. One is about an international poll showing the rest of the world is rooting for Obama to win. The other is about an international poll showing much of the rest of this same world believes either the United States or Israel were the perpetrators of the attacks of Sept.11. It is understandable that many Americans don't care that much about the good opinion of a world that thinks we attacked ourselves, and they worry how a "citizen of the world" would respond if we were attacked again.
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Family values are in the news again today, but this time it's the Democrats who are taking the heat. McCain's latest ad attacks Obama on the subject of sex ed, misstating the senator's voting record in the process. Over nursery school music, viewers are told that Obama is "wrong for [their] family" on the grounds that he wants kids to learn about sex before they learn how to read.
I've stated here before that I think sex should be introduced early and often to the elementary school curriculum. Mine's an opinion many people disagree with, and Barack Obama happens to be one of them.
Obama himself has said, "Nobody's suggesting that kindergartners are going to be getting information about sex in the way that we think about it." What he did support (in 2003) was a bill in the Illinois state legislature that would have introduced "instruction on the prevention of sexually transmitted infections, including the prevention, transmission and spread of HIV" to pre-existing programs.
Yes, Mitt Romney, I do think there's a sex ed curriculum that's appropriate for 5-year-olds, and it has more to do with protecting them from other people's misguided actions than from their own. The only sex ed current students even have a chance of seeing before middle school is the kind that limits itself to a discussion of acceptable body language, peer respect, and personal space or "inappropriate touching," as Obama's own campaign once referred to it.
And for the record, child literacy has nothing to do with children's ability to handle sex ed, unless you consider that, as they learn to read, children become more aware and more likely to process conflicting or inaccurate messages about sex. If McCain is truly concerned that kids learn to read before learning about sex, maybe he should stick to the topic at hand (education reform) and refocus his efforts on improving early reading skills.
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I'm trying to get work done on something else—a piece of writing and thinking not related to the Alaskan body-snatcher who seems to have invaded our collective brain—but my mind keeps returning to the trivial campaign flap of the day, this flurry of feigned outrage about "lipstick on a pig." Rachael's right that the Obama campaign's unfortunate choice of this phrase to describe the cynical repackaging of John McCain's economic plan opens the Dems up to charges of sexism. But I honestly can't decide: Is the use of the phrase, even if it does include a veiled jab at Palin, really sexist? After all, this is a woman who, in a much-praised convention speech (now being endlessly repeated on the stump) referred to herself as a "pit bull with lipstick." Isn't Obama's repurposing of a related metaphor just pointing out that, beneath that lipstick, the emperor's pit bull has no clothes?
As is being widely blogged today, McCain used the same figure of speech to deride Hillary's health care plan back in May. (The Christian Science Monitor reports that Dick Cheney also used it to demean Kerry's war record in 2004, and that Obama used it earlier in the campaign to criticize Bush's Iraq policy.) As far as I can recall, the Clinton campaign, which was never slow to seize upon opportunities for umbrage, let the phrase pass unnoticed (if anyone has a clip to refute that claim, please send along). Then again, McCain did preface his comparison with the sentence "I don't like to use this term." Why not? What would his disclaimer mean, if not that the phrase was somehow offensive to Hillary?
Pigs and pit bulls: two animals popularly considered to be unpleasant (though both can actually make smart and loving pets!), both repackaged with a slapped-on coat of Revlon (personally, I like Cherries in the Glow). The difference, of course, is that the pit-bull joke puts an admirable spin on the image of the dolled-up beast: Pit bulls are to be admired for their toughness and tenacity (and lipstick only makes them cuter!) while a pig is just a pig, cosmetics or no. What do the rest of you XX-ers think: If the Hillary campaign had cried sexism over the same porcine imagery, would you have given it more or less credence? And would you rather compare yourself to a dog, or have someone else compare your ideas to a pig?
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Barack Obama is going to wish he hadn't said this (via Politico):
Obama poked fun of McCain and Palin's new "change" mantra.
"You can put lipstick on a pig," he said as the crowd cheered. "It's still a pig."
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Wow, so many arrows aimed at Sarah Palin today that I'm not sure I can catch them all! First, let me address Dahlia's post about fabricating records and the infamous Bridge to Nowhere. From everything I've read, it's more of an exaggeration than a fabrication. And what politician is not guilty of highlighting the more flattering parts of his or her record? Yes, Palin said she supported the bridge when she was running for governor. (I'm not sure it helps her that Ted Stevens, of all people, came out and said he thought she never supported it.) And yes, Congress had decided against federal funding for the bridge by the time Palin did anything about it (over the objections of Barack Obama and Joe Biden, it's worth pointing out). But Palin DID put the kibosh on the bridge as governor, saying that the ridicule would hurt the state and they'd find another way. And really, if it's a crime against feminism to fabricate your record, I'd call Palin's a misdemeanor while Hillary's tall tale of sniper fire in Bosnia more of a felony.
As to Melinda's point that Palin pre-emptively played the victim cards of "gender, class, and media bias," I think it's safe to say the media bias HAD set in by the time she delivered her speech in St. Paul, Minn. If you don't believe me, take David Carr's word for it in the NYT:
Before Gov. Sarah Palin came flying in from the wilds of Alaska for the Republican convention in St. Paul, there was a lot of sniggering in media rooms and satellite trucks about her beauty queen looks and rustic hobbies, and the suggestion that she was better suited to be a calendar model for a local auto body shop than a holder of the second-highest office in the land.
And Sally Quinn questioned Palin's ability to keep a demanding job while taking care of a special needs infant and a grandchild. (Is that a double whammy for gender bias and media bias?)
Finally, while Rosa has already addressed the issue of taxpayers paying for her children's travel expenses—and I agree the per-diem expenses are kind of sketchy—the fact remains that, as the Washington Post points out today, her travel expenses of $93,000 were quite a bit less than the $463,000 that the previous governor chalked up, presumably on that private jet that Palin sold on eBay.
If I've been surprised by anything since Palin joined the ticket—and like everyone else, I've been surprised by many things—it's my newfound understanding of the hard-core Hillary supporters, who clustered around her protectively as her campaign was falling apart. I have my own quarrels with Palin, and I'm quite confident that she can take care of herself (she does know how to field dress a moose, after all), but the more people go after her, the more I'm going to put aside those concerns and support her. Maybe that explains the poll about the white women moving toward McCain.
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For those who want something other than dismal polls to pore over and need a dose of underisive pointy-headedness, check out the Web site Edge. Over there a so-called Reality Club of liberal social scientists and others is discussing a very interesting essay by University of Virginia psychologist Jonathan Haidt called "What Makes People Vote Republican." And the Republicans say elitists only sneer!
On the contrary, Haidt (author of The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom) argues that it's time liberals examined the self-righteous assumption that people vote Republican because they're narrow-minded and rigid. Perhaps there's something in the Republican moral vision that people prefer and that Democrats might learn from. "[M]orality is not just about how we treat each other (as most liberals think); it is also about binding groups together, supporting essential institutions, and living in a sanctified and noble way. When Republicans say that Democrats ‘just don't get it,' this is the ‘it' to which they refer." XX fans might check out the response of one club member in particular, Berkeley psychologist Alison Gopnik (author of The Scientist in the Crib), which is especially apt in the Palin era. Gopnik writes about how liberals don't really know how to talk about the moral intuitions of child-rearing—the ethics of family caretaking—because those don't rest on individualist or universalist ideas. She points out that conservatives are confused, too, and urges joint thinking and talking.
It's all fascinating—yet also frustrating. Here's a club displaying the opposite of elitist condescension, yet in the process, they can't help opening themselves up to anti-elitist condescension. It might sound something like this: If you have to think this hard, you'll never really get it.
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Both:
- Look confused when asked questions.
- Like to poop on the environment.
- Are good at following the commands of their handlers.
- Remain quiet on the birth control issue.
- Have extensive foreign policy experience.
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For once, I find myself sympathizing with Sarah Palin. Today's Washington Post has a story on Palin's use of Alaska state funds as governor. Apparently she did two things the Post considers questionable. Charge No. 1: She accepted a state per diem while staying at her home in Wasilla (this was technically OK because her place of work is Juneau, but, uh, the per diem is supposed to cover expenses for meals, etc., while someone is traveling on official business and has to eat in restaurants and so on. The per diem is clearly not intended to cover someone's supermarket trips or trips to the diner when they're home or visiting relatives for the weekend. So, I agree: Palin should not have taken that per diem during days spent entirely at her own home.)
But charge No. 2 is different: Apparently, she often got the state to pay for her children's travel and hotel when she went places as governor.
I gave the article only a quick read, but I can't summon up a particle of outrage about charge No. 2. My feeling? a) We want women to serve in public office; b) Women often have these little appendages called "children"; c) Women (and men, too!) should not have to choose between serving the public and laying eyes on their children from time to time; d) If we want people with families to be able to serve as high-ranking public officials, and if we want to ask those high-ranking public officials to travel frequently as part of their jobs, then hell, yeah, we taxpayers should be willing to foot the bill for them to bring their kids along—perhaps not always, but certainly sometimes. It seems reasonable to have some controls on spending, but it also seems reasonable for Palin to feel that if she has to schlep all over the state (or the country), she should be able to bring her kids with her some of the time.
The alternative to taxpayers footing the bill for some of this? The only people who will serve in such public office will be the childless, those who don't care about their kids, and those rich enough to pay on their own. I'd rather contribute some of my tax dollars. Yes, even for Bristol.
UPDATE 5 pm: Yes, and I do think that everyone, not just governors, should have access to high quality and reasonably priced childcare-- and would be delighted to see my tax dollars go towards that. But meanwhile-- I also think any employer who is serious about attracting and retaining women should consider a) subsidizing for childcare if employees are expected to work long or "unusual" hours and b) paying for kids to travel sometimes if they require a great deal of travel from employees as part of the job. No, this doesn't mean unlimited subsidization-- as I said above, it seems reasonable to have some controls on spending (so the person with ten kids might be out of luck). But again, if we want women, who tend to have greater childcare responsibilities, to be able to pursue the same kind of careers as men, then yes, we need to make sure that work and parenting are not incompatible. And I'll gladly pay a little extra on April 15 to help make sure women (and men who take parenting seriously) will be willing to pursue careers in public office, too.
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Emily, I think you are right that it’s always going to be a huge mistake to attack Sarah Palin for personal or family decisions—even if she is relentlessly cashing in on them. Images like this one don’t help, either. As Melinda observes, any references at all to Palin’s gender will net out to her benefit, even when the underlying criticism is valid. Let's not judge lest we be judged. So how do we thread this needle? What can we fairly scrutinize? Turns out that discussing her managerial mistakes and inexperience is going to be equally fraught; it’s patronizing to suggest she's unprepared. Perhaps the best place to focus, then, is on her fabrications—like the disproved claim that she opposed the “Bridge to Nowhere”—which the mainstream media now appears to understand despite its continued deployment by the McCain campaign.
The “new feminism” may include uncritical support for women who oppose teen pregnancy programs and for women who force rape victims to pay for their own rape kits. But I just don’t see where support for women who persist in fabricating their own records is a feminist principle.
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Is it paranoid to look at this morning's papers and conclude that your national nightmare has come true, that the Palin magic has, in fact, bewitched the country? Let's look at the numbers. The new Washington Post/ABC poll shows McCain and Obama now in a dead heat, with most of the shift coming from white women defecting to McCain.
These are not Hillary voters. The poll finds that 78 percent of voters who wanted Clinton as president are now backing Obama.
So who are they, and what made them changed their minds? A brief tally to see if SP gets all the credit.
1. More voters now say the McCain ticket would do more to change government, and he is almost even with Obama on that question.
One point for SP. McCain hasn't won anything new on that front. His convention speech was standard Beltway bipartisan droning. She has the radical reform story, having taken down the Alaska establishment.
2. More people are calling themselves "very enthusiastic" about his presidency.
Again, SP. Cheerleader all the way. Go team!
3. More people now trust him on the domestic issues—the economy, social values, energy policy.
Again, I give credit to SP. Cindy McCain's personal narrative reeks of noblesse oblige—the charity work, the overseas adoption, addiction to painkillers, the $10,000 suits. These kinds of details don't resonate with the masses. Instead, it's what we (the evil media) see as SP's screw-ups that are clearly having an everywoman appeal. I, too, got accidentally pregnant, says the White Woman. My daughter is also a little sl__.
Social values? SP for sure. Even energy is the one issue on which she can claim expertise.
So, in conclusion: Sometimes it pays to be paranoid.
In the meantime, my favorite SP story of the day is the Washington Post's scooplet about her having billed the state for time spent at home. Apparently, she filed for per diem expenses, meant for travel, on days she was hanging around in Wasilla, including four days before she gave birth. This is the ultimate conflation of the personal and political and the ultimate confirmation of the Christian working mother's sense of entitlement that "mom" ranks equal as a job title.
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No, Emily, we should not judge Sarah Palin as a mother, no matter how beguilingly she and her impulsive soulmate invite us to do so. Remember when the Earth was young, 10 days ago, and we were still wondering about the Hillary Holdouts? If they haven't been scared straight by now, they aren't coming back. But one thing I hope we learned from them is that sexist attacks helped Hillary more than they hurt her, energizing her supporters and winning her some converts, too, among women who weren't totally sold until they saw her criticized in ways a man wouldn't be. Every sexist shot not only boomeranged, but was held against Barack Obama. Which is why everyone who wants him to win should mind Dahlia's advice to Joe Biden and avoid certain modes of attack altogether.
This is especially critical given the latest polling, which suggests that many women really are switching from Obama to McCain because he's chosen a female running mate: According to a Washington Post-ABC News poll, "white women shifted from an 8-point pre-convention edge for Obama to a 12-point McCain advantage now.''
Like Hillary Clinton and every Republican in my lifetime—with the exception of Sen. Soulmate, before he got religion and lost our phone number—Palin is running against the media. So our sins will be held against the Obama-Biden ticket, too. With time so short, she did not even wait to be attacked before throwing down the victim cards of gender, class, and media bias: "I've learned quickly, these past few days,'' she said in her convention speech, "that if you're not a member in good standing of the Washington elite, then some in the media consider a candidate unqualified for that reason alone.'' (Are these the same "some'' who want us to make nice with terrorists? Or the "they'' who hate us because we're free?) Sure, but then why bring the straw man to life by lunging for the bait? Mike Barnicle played right into her hands, worrying on MSNBC about who'd be minding little Trig if Mummy was off working in the Executive Office Building.
And the more Democrats rant about God, guns, babies, and Sarah P., the better for McCain, who must have been doing the happy dance after Harry Reid described her tone as shrill, and when Biden joked that one big diff between them was that she was better lookin'. I was in Toledo for that one; that is what he said, and Obama was just as casual with his words that day, repeatedly addressing older women in the audience as "young lady.'' :(
This past weekend, my 12-year-old son, who totally knows how to work me, suggested that we celebrate my return from the Sarah Palin Party Convention in St. Paul by watching The Contender in her honor. I'd forgotten, but it's one of those heavy-handed, here-comes-the-crowbar and there-goes-your-cranium liberal morality tales about a Sen. Laine Hanson, played by Joan Allen, who's tapped to become the vice president after the guy in office dies. Her top adviser is her husband, but that's about all Hanson and Palin have in common. Early in the movie, we see the Clinton-ish president, played by Jeff Bridges, wondering whether a woman who has served only a decade in the U.S. Senate will be seen as experienced enough to handle the job, especially on the foreign-policy front.
Only oops, he was so busy trying to stump the White House chef that, just like John McCain, he seems to have neglected to vet his pick, whose past is more exciting than he might have hoped. For one thing, though it has somehow previously escaped the nation's notice, she appropriated her best friend's husband while he was managing her first campaign. A story that she had sex with a bunch of guys at a drunken college party turns out not to be true. Hanson would rather withdraw her name than dignify her accusers with a denial, but Bubba convinces the country that we're better than that, too, and don't need to know. So yay, she's in, and sex scandals are out!
There is one scene relevant to life on this planet, however: When consultants advise Hanson's craven shell of a formerly good-guy rival to "gut the bitch,'' he winces but goes along, and is ruined in the end. Though part of me is looking for a reason to wag my finger and say, "Let that be a lesson to you, young man," it's not really Obama or jaw-flappin' Joe that I worry about getting carried away like that; it's the rest of us I'm not so sure of.
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Emily, I absolutely agree that the personal and professional have become hopelessly entangled in this election. In her 11th day in the spotlight, Palin has already been compared to movie stars, a TV chef, and an '80s pop star turned reality TV darling. Faster than you can say, "Bitch is the new black," it seems, a new celebrity comparison emerges.
Honestly, the mind reels. A partial list of purported alter egos:
Rachael Ray: The New York Times' David Carr portrayed Palin's relationship to the media as that of "Rachael Ray with a 4x4, who can not only make a meal in under 30 minutes but hunt and kill the main course."
Tina Fey: Apparently, "every American with access to 30 Rock and a blog" sees a resemblance between the VP nominee and NBC's brightest comedian. Seriously?
Audrey Hepburn: Drawn in by Palin's bangs and updo, Ann Althouse compared the self-described "pit bull with lipstick" to the 20th-century icon of elegance personified. A stretch.
Paula Abdul: The New York Post saw Althouse's movie star and raised her an American Idol judge, saying, "Palin won style points for updating from an Audrey Hepburn to a Paula Abdul look" by wearing her hair half-up to give her acceptance speech.
Margaret Thatcher: The one relevant, if not exactly accurate, analogy in the mix. The British press have jumped on the comparison. But isn't it a bit early to see the gravitas of a woman who ran a country for 11 years in the face of a novice candidate? Besides, Hillary Clinton garnered her fair share of comparisons to the "Iron Lady," and drawing a line between Clinton and Palin by way of Thatcher seems to test the laws of geometry.
The other nods to celebrity, though not entirely unflattering, are a distraction with less than two months to go until the election. Margaret Thatcher aside, should we really be thinking of Palin in terms of her inspired tresses or domestic prowess? I don't think so.
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Michelle Cottle has a great essay in the New Republic bemoaning the campaign season as one long setback for feminism, beginning with Hillary Clinton's decision to play the grievance card right on through to her still enraged supporters, as well as John McCain's pick of Sarah Palin, because she's underqualified. Cottle is careful to say, as is Dahlia here, that Palin has smarts and strengths, and could be a perfectly able and qualified vice presidential choice. Someday. The point is that she's not there yet, and would never have gotten the nod if she weren't a woman.
Right. And that should help guide us in sorting through the Republicans' charges that the press and anyone else who raises questions about Palin is subjecting her to sexist treatment. If the question is about her experience and record, and whether and how it merits the vice presidency, then it's all fair game. To suggest otherwise, as the Republicans are loudly doing, is to cry wolf. And doesn't it seem like this will, or at least should, come back to bite them, the next time they mock the Democrats on this score?
But if the questions about Palin focus on whether she can be the vice president and a good mother to her five kids, then they seem suspect pretty quickly. No one is asking John McCain how his seven kids are handling his busy schedule. The problem, of course, is that the motherhood part of the Palin picture is endlessly colorful, and that she herself is invoking it as a reason for voters to like and trust her. In the cult-of-personality universe in which we assess presidential candidates, there's no way to separate the personal from the professional. Tricky. Thoughts?
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My office is all abuzz about Good Morning America's spot this morning, "Palin's Pals," in which GMA interviews four of her closest friends. My response was: Is this The View-ification of the country? Am I really supposed to care what her friends say about her? Please! What does that have to do with voting record and politics? Would any news show dare such a dumbed-down tactic about a male politician? I suppose the media does do such a thing, when they interview male politicians' wives. I always recoil from those speeches, in which females are the ones designated as the bearers of emotional truth.
Fortunately, three of Palin's laconic crew (is it an Alaskan thing? These women are very, very laid back) refuse to say who they will vote for. (Three of them, interestingly, declare that they are pro-choice.) They have the great sense to say that their friendships don't depend on shared politics. My mom the small-town politician - a Democrat in the heavily Republican Greene County, Ohio - also has an array of friends with whom she does not discuss politics, because it leads to nothing good.
But my female coworkers found the "Pals" lack of enthusiasm for Palin quite shocking. My co-workers' view is this: If the Pals weren't going to rave about Sarah, they shouldn't have gone on television. They concluded that this reticence said something damning about Palin and declared those friendships dead.
Every now and then I wonder whether I am Spock's long-lost Vulcan sister. Am I unusual in not caring a whit about what her nonpolitical friends think? How does this relate to the price of gas?
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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 ...
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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.
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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.
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What I'm stuck on is that image of Bristol Palin and her betrothed holding hands up on stage last night, along with the rest of her family, as the party of Bill Bennett and the Family Research Council applauded. It isn't that I think she should have been locked in a closet somewhere, or shipped off for a "year abroad'' in nearby Russia. But when my best friend got pregnant in high school in the conservative town of 8,000 where we grew up, I do not remember anybody throwing her a parade; nope, pretty sure that did not happen. (I also don't remember anybody thinking that our mayor was qualified to be president, but that might be my small-town humility talkin'.) So, is the takeaway that the Republican Party is getting more tolerant, or that, as Hanna says, the only thing that matters is that she's carrying the child to term? Maybe, but when I try to imagine an Obama (or any Democrat's) daughter up there in a similar situation, my guess is no; if that happened, wouldn't we be hearing about how that's what liberal permissiveness and Hollywood and rap music and Bill Clinton hath wrought?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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?
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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.
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The Palin nomination may be politically suicidal in the long term, but it's culturally canny in the short term. It's galvanized McCain's base while making the liberal media's assumptions about the cultural wars look more muddled than ever.
I haven't posted yet about Sarah Palin because I can't separate her appointment from the media's reaction to it. As Dahlia said, there was a Lifetime movie marathon quality to the coverage this weekend of Palin and her many "dramas," of which
Bristol's pregnancy is only the most recent (and most spectacular?) iteration. The Lifetime coverage reached an apogee this morning with the publication of a New York Times front-page story about whether Palin should be running for VP given that she has a young Down syndrome baby. According to the Times, Palin's appointment has "set off a fierce argument among women about whether there are enough hours in the day for her to take on the vice presidency, and whether she is right to." Only, the article's authors posit, the usual culture-war divide has been reversed, with stay-at-home moms defending Palin and working mothers condemning her. I'm sure this is, in part, true. But this "reversal" seems to me less a "surprising" new twist in the culture wars than a gritty reflection of the reality of life for women today: The categories aren't as tidy as they're made out to be. Life in America isn't simply "red" or "blue" but something in between, rife with contradiction and complication. Palin's position on abortion is hardly feminist, but her choice to get back to work three days after giving birth might well please old hard-liners like Shulamith Firestone.
It's a reminder that the Mommy Wars debates are largely had by people who can afford to spend a lot of time theorizing in op-ed columns rather than trying to put gas in the car and food on the table. Feminist liberal moms sometimes choose to stay home while evangelical moms sometimes have to work; they may not want to, but a study I once wrote about suggested they feel less unhappiness about finding a "work-life" balance than their feminist peers do. It's a psychological truism that people who judge you are really reflecting something of their own anxieties. Why else, in the supposed age of gender equality, do we respond with the same old Pavlovian frenzy when the mommy-isn't-at-home bell is rung instead of stepping back to ask: How can we change our culture so this is a decision that falls equally to mom and dad? How come feminist-minded journalists don't take male politicians to task for how they run their lives but get in at arms when a conservative mother chooses to run for national office? As Anne pointed out, isn't this ironic? Whatever the problems I have with Palin’s politics, her decision to run for VP as a mom with a young kid is not one of them.
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- Learn about al-Qaida.
- Learn about Washington, D.C.
- Order Bristol's dress (Elastic waist!!! Is white inappropriate after six months?)
- Fire brother-in-law.
- Learn about Russia/Georgia/S. Ossetia (Locate Abkhazia???)
- Nurse Baby Trig.
- Order flowers for wedding.
- Fire people who haven't fired brother-in-law.
- Learn about ethics rules.
- Fire at brother-in-law? (Option: aerial shooting?)
- Nurse Baby Trig.
- Learn about Iran.
- Learn about U.S. Senate.
- Learn about contraception. (Too late???)
- Investigate homes for foundlings?
- Govern Alaska.
- Life insurance on J.M.?
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Slate spouse Nora Krug sends in this guest post to XX Factor:
Of course, Bristol Palin is not the first vice-presidential child to be pregnant out of wedlock. That honor goes to Mary Cheney. (Perhaps this is something the GOP vetting committee looks for?)
But at least Bristol is allowed to get married.
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It's interesting that the original rumor had Sarah Palin in the role of the sacrificial mother, protecting her daughter from exposure as a knocked-up teenager and presumably guaranteeing the baby an upbringing in a firmly established family. The real story has Sarah Palin plunging into the limelight, thereby guaranteeing that it's the whole nation, not merely Bristol's high school peers and their parents, who know her daughter's situation. And this baby—certainly if Palin's ticket wins—can't exactly count on doting grandparents at the ready to back up the teenage newlyweds. As between the two scenarios, it strikes me that the first in fact might fly better, not just with the evangelical, pro-family base, but with everybody else, too. And what, I wonder, does the comparison tell us about the stigma, or lack thereof, of teenage pregnancy? The rumor presumed it was something to hide; the reality suggests it's fine to flaunt it. Ah, for the old days of the simple culture war paradigm, when "traditional" nuclear family values reigned in red America.
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Slate's Jim Ledbetter sends in the following guest post:
The irony struck me while watching cable television from my Denver hotel room on Friday morning: A kind of token feminism had finally hit the Republican Party, and was immediately being questioned by—of all people—cable television commentators. Does anyone believe that the blowdried blonds (male and female, but for purposes of this argument, female) who read newscasts from teleprompters are chosen strictly for their journalistic skills? Putting women in front of the camera—like putting women on the covers of magazines—is a proven way of attracting the attention of media consumers both male and female. It should come as little surprise that the McCain campaign—which has never come anywhere near 50 percent support in any credible national poll—sought to apply this same media logic to politics. Don’t get me wrong: I share completely the view that Sarah Palin is not qualified to be the vice president of the United States, and that McCain’s choice is a world-class act of cynical political calculation, rather than any attempt to put “Country First.” At the same time, neither liberals nor conservatives have figured out the right balance between rewarding “qualified” women and sheer representation of women in places where it is deemed to matter. The logic of affirmative action is that given equal or near-equal conditions, preference should be given to members of historically underrepresented groups. The current contortions through which Republicans are trying to argue that Palin is qualified can be read as an argument that gender representation trumps experience, an argument not unfamiliar on the democratic left, and certainly not on cable television. And anyway, if McCain and Palin end up losing, who doubts that CNN and Fox will be competing to offer her a show?
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A few years ago, I went to a wedding, in the trippy hillside Israeli town Szefat, between an ultra-Orthodox Jewish Israeli and his Dutch soon-to-be-convert bride. She was eight months pregnant, her bulge apparent even under the white tentlike cotton that covered her from head to foot. Szefat is the place Jews go to dabble in mysticism and born-again Judaism. You might think that a knocked-up bride there would inspire, if not condemnation, at least embarrassed jokes. But I saw only joy and celebration around me: The only thing that mattered was that the bride would marry and convert before the birth of the child, making him a Jew (because Jewish law recognizes only matrilineal descent).
American evangelical Christians aren't the Jews of Szefat, of course. But on this point, I think fundamentalists of different faiths agree far more than they differ. I can't imagine Bristol Palin's pregnancy will be condemned much, if at all, by the religious base that Palin was picked to attract. Instead, the emphasis will all be on her impending marriage and on praising her parents for standing by her. At first, I didn't really believe that John McCain knew about the pregnant daughter when he tapped for his veep the mother whose abstinence teachings didn't take. But the more I think about it, the more I think McCain may have known and plunged ahead regardless, counting on Bristol's redemption to save his choice—and serve up a mesmerizing and distracting soap opera, too, as Dahlia so aptly reminds us. Forget that Palin got a passport only last year, or that she didn't even supervise garbage collection as a suburban mayor (her town of Wassila, Alaska, contracts it out). Instead what we're talking about are Palin's family dramas. Which many voters are probably reluctant to sit in judgment about, because on some level, who doesn't feel for the mother with the Down Syndrome fetus or the wayward teenage daughter?
I have to hope, though, that the other base Palin has been deployed to bring on home to the GOP ticket—independent and Democratic women who supported Hillary—will talk and ogle with the rest of us, and then remember that John McCain's running mate's daughter's pregnancy has absolutely nothing to do with what years eight through 12 of a Republican White House would be like. Talk about turning an election into a cotton-candy-fest of celebrity. Let's mine this vein, yes, and then move back to the big looming issues—economic, national, global—that will affect many more people than Palin and her family. Anne, I don't think the feminists who argued that family life is the stuff of "real" politics would want it otherwise.
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Isn't there an irony here? All of that stuff being discussed with such energy today, most of which must look to the Republican campaign like dirty laundry—teenage pregnancy, flights in late pregnancy, decisions about abortion, child-raising—is the sort of material that, once upon a time, feminists described as "real" politics, of far greater importance than the tedious bourgeois political debate. And now it really is, suddenly, "real" politics, thanks to an evangelical conservative woman who brought all of it into the very center of the bourgeois political debate.
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This whole weekend has felt like a marathon of Lifetime television. All anyone wants to talk about all of a sudden is the intimate family choices of stressed-out working mothers. Every woman I know is consumed by Sarah Palin’s larger-than-life life: Was it irresponsible for her to continue on as governor, having given birth to a special needs baby? Was it reckless of her to accept a vice presidential tap on top of that? Should she really have been flying in the eighth month of her high-risk pregnancy? Is she doing the right thing by supporting her unmarried teenage daughter whose pregnancy she revealed a few hours ago? Should she have inserted herself into her sister’s messy marriage? Feminist or otherwise, everyone has an opinion on Sarah Palin’s life and family and choices. We’ve all been here before, in our own lives. It’s almost a palpable relief to be able to talk about all this stuff at cocktail parties.
This is the Pandora’s box John McCain opened up when he picked Palin as his running mate—a woman whose family life is vastly more interesting than her very brief political career. Is it sexist that everyone is judging Palin on the former rather than the latter? Yes. But I suspect that all this frenzied close-reading of Sarah Palin’s uterine life was unavoidable. What are the "mommy wars" if not broad female judgments about other women’s private decisions? The truth is, whether or not John McCain wanted to have that big, brutal public conversation about the reality of abstinence and teen pregnancy and contraception and teenage mothers without the means to support their children, Sarah Palin is pushing it all onto the front pages. I don’t think the GOP intended to have this conversation at all, and definitely not on these terms. McCain could easily have named a Margaret Thatcher type whose work/family balance wasn’t quite so riveting. But Palin reflects the reality of women’s lives in America. Come on in, John McCain. It’s messy in here, but we’ve been waiting decades to show you the place.
Read the rest of the XX Factor conversation about Bristol Palin's pregnancy.
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Yesterday the Internet was buzzing with the rumor that Palin was actually the grandmother of her 4-month-old baby, Trig. The allegation was that the baby was the child of her teenage daughter Bristol, and Palin faked a pregnancy to cover this up. How better to knock down the story that you're a grandmother and your daughter was knocked up than to reveal that you're about to be a grandmother and your daughter is knocked up (and that the girl plans to marry the father of the child)? One hopes Bristol Palin's pregnancy means fewer speeches at the Republican Convention about the value of abstinence-only education for our teenagers, but we'll probably just hear about the value of choosing life, as if giving birth before your high school graduation is better than making honor roll. Isn't this all becoming a little too much? I hope the governor and grandmother-to-be is not planning a combination inaugural and destination wedding in D.C.
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The news that Sarah Palin's 17-year-old daughter is pregnant has me thinking about the nuttily mixed messages that Palin's selection (and the media presentation thereof) sends out to women. It's a cornucopia of paradox: Her candidacy is somehow supposed to be a glass-ceiling-shattering inspiration, even though she actively opposes feminist causes like equal pay and reproductive choice. Her bearing of a Down syndrome baby while governing a state makes her a praiseworthy mother figure -- but don't forget that she's also a tireless workaholic (more than one profile has noted with awe that she was back at work three days after the birth of Trig in April.) Now the pro-life, devoutly Christian (yet sexy!) supermom has a knocked-up teen daughter ... but since we've already established that keeping your baby no matter what is a badge of moral honor, this development may actually enhance Palin's standing with the evangelical base. Forget about left and right for a moment: If you're a young girl looking for a role model of a woman running for high office, how do you decode all of this?