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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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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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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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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.