The XX Factor: What women really think.

Sympathy Votes?

Hanna, your nightmare is my nightmare but not because I fear it will affect the outcome of the election. I fear for what it says about the power of playing the victim, and how far we can push it before we’ve lost more than we have gained.

Of course Sarah Palin will play the victim card tonight. Best as I can tell, it’s the only card she’s played since her name was announced: The perky victim, relentlessly cheerful in the face of conspiracies too numerous to name. So let’s stipulate that going into the debates Palin is already the victim of “media elites” and the “Washington establishment.” She is a victim of the bloodthirsty Alaska legislature. She is a victim of a media pile-on, resulting in her near media blackout, while simultaneously (if mysteriously) being a victim of media “censorship.” Palin enters tonight’s debate a victim of sexism; elitism; gotcha-ism; small-town-ism. And well in advance of the debate she is also a victim of Gwen Ifill’s in-the-tank-ism.

But even if you and Emily and Judith Warner are right that nobody with an ounce of compassion can enjoy witnessing Palin’s public embarrassment, I can’t see how that translates into votes. Even if it’s true that “the image of Palin as victim, deserving of sympathy, will emerge clearly before the nation tonight,” I’m not sure that means much more than a lot of Americans who will vote for Obama while feeling really bad for Sarah Palin. I don’t know that in light of the serious crises voters are facing, pity will achieve more for Gov. Palin than just pity. Maybe I am misreading the lesson of all the women who were galvanized by the attacks on Hillary Clinton. But while I think sympathy for the sexism with which Clinton was treated represented some of that support, most of those women also saw her as the best possible candidate for office, being cruelly held back for her gender. New polls show that Palin is widely seen as too inexperienced to be taken seriously and apparently women agree with that assessment. They seem to increasingly find it hard to attribute Palin’s collapse to gender alone or to rally behind her for that reason. Americans are feeling badly victimized right now and I’m not sure that this will lead them to rally behind another victim. They will buy Palin’s memoir. They will watch her movie once it’s turned into a Lifetime miniseries. They—and we—will admire her political skills. But will they put her in Dick Cheney’s chair because she’s been treated badly? God I hope not.