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  "Palin's Pals" on Good Morning America

  Posted Monday, September 08, 2008 11:30 AM | By E.J. Graff

  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?

  Filed under: Sarah Palin, women's friendships

About E.J. Graff

• E.J. Graff is associate director and senior researcher at Brandeis University's Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism, where she directs the Gender & Justice Project. She is a resident scholar at the Brandeis Women's Studies Research Center. As a journalist and author, her work has appeared in such venues as The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, Foreign Policy magazine, The Boston Globe, The Los Angeles Times, Columbia Journalism Review, Good Housekeeping, The Nation, The New Republic, and in more than a dozen anthologies. She collaborated on former Massachusetts Lt. Governor Evelyn Murphy's book Getting Even: Why Women Don't Get Paid Like Men--and What To Do About It (Simon & Schuster, 2005). Her first book, What Is Marriage For? The Strange Social History of Our Most Intimate Institution, has been widely cited in legal journals, reprinted for academic use, entered as courtroom exhibits, and quoted by government policymaking bodies.

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