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

Playing Out the Palin Play

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.