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    The Next Woman

    Posted Tuesday, November 04, 2008 10:17 AM | By Emily Bazelon
    Welcome, Lauren, and thanks to you and Nina for starting to puzzle over these identity implications of the campaign, which will be with us long after the polls close today. (Oh, what a glorious phrase: The polls will actually close.) If post-gender means that you don't run away from the female part of candidate but you don't lead with your mother or sexy librarian side, either, then I'm with Nina: Palin isn't there. For that matter, Hillary wasn't quite either, because at key moments she appealed to women by reminding us of her own victimhood. On the other hand, she did get us past the commander in chief bar. My own fear has been that Palin ran right back into it. But that's not because she's a woman or even because she winks and flirts with her audience. It's because she has shown us that she knows little where a vice-presidential candidate should know a lot. So maybe we are at the point at which the next woman with serious qualifications will indeed mount a post-gender candidacy. And maybe Palin helps bring that about, too, in the sense that Michael Kinsley writes about today: Because of her and Obama (and I'd add, Hillary), he argues, it's "hard to imagine" that future pictures of the two presidential candidates with their VP picks will show us four white men. Actually, that seems a bit aspirational to me: I can imagine plenty such pictures. But are they less likely than they were before? Yes.
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