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The funny thing about Sarah Palin's expensive new wardrobe is that most of her recent purchases are faux down-market, simple pieces like the black pencil skirt she had on at the convention, or the white blouses she often wears -- clothes that look as if they could have come from Talbot's, but didn't. Which is just what they're shooting for, so to speak, because that way she looks great, yet not too high falootin'. But wait, her spokeswoman says they always intended to donate her clothes to charity after the campaign; does that imply they expect to lose? Do they want them dry-cleaned and left in a bag at the door before they ship her back where she came from? Or does it mean that, win or lose, they're taking the clothes off her back? That doesn't seem very sporting. But it is very Cinderella - there's another archetype for you, Hanna -- and I guess on Nov. 4th it turns midnight.
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Dahlia's got it: what's depressing about Palin is that she represents the Ann Coulterization of the Republican party. That's what was tugging at my unconscious mind as I watched her spout the most vicious and irresponsible claptrap, with such a gleeful expression on her face.
Watching Palin was like watching a cross between Ann Coulter and Michelle Malkin-- only Palin accessorizes with babies. And she's got a governorship, instead of a column or a TV show.
I'm beginning to suspect that it's not just me, either. Palin offered red meat to the hungry GOP faithful, but not sure how her speech played with independents. Way too soon to really know-- but for what it's worth, a Detroit Free Press focus group wasn't too impressed with her.
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I haven’t posted yet on the Sarah Palin Show, mainly because it’s all just been too darn entertaining to stop snorting and say anything intelligent. Last week I persuaded a twentysomething family friend to tune into the Obama speech by telling her that political conventions were no different from reality TV. My young friend has been texting me with every new Palin-palooza, as astonished as I have been by how correct that assessment was.
But I do want to comment on this false idea: that just because Palin is a woman, she is also a feminist. Or that just because she’s a woman, her nomination is a feminist act. Or that just because she’s a woman, Hillary-mourning women everywhere will vote for her, inspired simply by sharing chromosomes with a candidate. As my nephews would say, nuh-uh.
Love her or hate her, Hillary wears standard-issue feminism proudly. It's based on the idea that women and men should be treated equally; that the odds are still stacked against women (and many others) in many areas of life; and that these structural issues—say, the lack of early childhood education or health care for all families—are problems we should address together, and in fact, can fix only together. That's why she got called all those nasty sexist things, like "hysterical" and "bitch": because she was trying to shake off the femininity box.
What Sarah Palin is pushing is something quite different. She's milking a kind of feminine chauvinism: I am mother (hockey mom? hot mama?), hear me roar. She's using womanhood and all its trappings to further her family and her career. Of course, many of us at least occasionally use womanhood to our advantage—can you do the Helpless Female Gaze and duck a speeding ticket? But Palin appears to have no interest in knocking down structural barriers to female (or human) flourishing. Contrary to what Anne said awhile back, Palin wouldn’t have been nominated without feminism; there just wasn’t a market for a female veep candidate until Hillary and the White House Project and all those tiresome discussions of unequal pay created that market. Now that she's nominated, though, Palin appears happy to reap that advance without expanding on it. Her gleeful meanness last night made me think of her as the infamous Queen Bee type, so brilliantly captured by Meryl Streep in The Devil Wears Prada, with its philosophy of I’m glamorous/you’re a germ. She’s got hers; you get your own, and get out of her way.
As an example of her anti-feminism, consider her line-item veto of funding to support teen moms, reported by the Washington Post. The project she slashed would have given "young mothers a place to live with their babies for up to eighteen months while they gain the necessary skills and resources to change their lives" and help teen moms "become productive, successful, independent adults who create and provide a stable environment for themselves and their families." It’s not that Alaska didn’t have the money for the project. Under Palin’s leadership, the People’s Republic of Alaska redistributed oil tax revenues, sending every one of its 670,000 residents a $3,200 payout this year. And in 2005, the state took in $1.81 in federal monies for every federal tax dollar paid by its residents, making it look like a welfare state. No, Palin was sending a clear message: Back off talking about my pregnant daughter, that’s my family’s business. Your pregnant daughter is on her own.
Palin stands for tribe-, class-, and biology-as-destiny, for letting pregnancy and poverty and group membership determine your life course. If you are dumb enough to let anything bad hit you, too bad for you. She may be a hit with the base, but she’s not gonna win over PUMAs or moderate women—at least, it hasn't happened yet. Having the right chromosomes is not enough to swindle all of the women all of the time. And I hope not most of the women at all.
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Rosa, I couldn't agree more about the nastiness. What we saw last night was the mainstreaming of Ann Coulter, the normalization of the principle that it isn't bile when it's spoken by a pretty woman. Coulter has gloated, "I am emboldened by my looks to say things Republican men wouldn't." And even though the Post reports today that Palin's was a "masculine" speech—written before the final candidate was selected—it bore so very many hallmarks of a vintage Coulter/Ingraham performance. Susan Estrich describes the Coulter approach as a play "to the lowest common denominator of derision, labeling the hero a coward, her opponent a traitor ... she is about suspicion and exclusion," and anyone who pushes back is a member of the "liberal media elite" and a sexist.
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I'm not surprised that Sarah Palin can deliver a good speech. In my opinion, anyone capable of handling five kids and ANY job and not ending up in the loony bin presumptively has at least the raw smarts and managerial skills to run the Oval Office. So take a smart, tough, capable, ambitious woman, put her together for a week with the smartest, toughest, most capable and ambitious Republican political consultants, and it's a pretty good bet you're gonna come out with a woman who delivers a powerful speech.
But what an unbelievably vicious speech! The nastiness level was just sky-high (or gutter low). And though Palin certainly didn't write the words she spoke, she sure looked like she enjoyed every second of delivering those zingers. That speech wasn't meant to inspire—it wasn't about our better selves or what we might be able to accomplish, as a nation—it was all about rage, sarcasm, resentment, mockery. And the crowd just lapped it up.
Should I be surprised by this? Probably not; it's the meat and potatoes of the conservative culture wars and standard fare at Republican powwows of the past couple of decades. But all the same, I expected better of John McCain, a man I've often liked and admired over the years precisely for his resistance to using that Us-vs.-Them playbook. This year, with Obama's message of inclusion and hope, and McCain at the top of the Republican ticket, I thought we might at last break free of that kind of nastiness—that politics of smallness, of diminishment and suspicion and resentment.
Silly me.
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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.