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My beloved Liz Lemon—er, I mean Tina Fey—isn't the only one suggesting that Sarah Palin's focus has shifted from 2008 to 2012. Today, trying get a jump on the post-election story before the polls even open, much less close, a host of politicos are placing their bets over who will emerge from the broken GOP as the next to be (unofficially) crowned party leader.
When John McCain chose his running mate, he was rightfully lambasted as cynical for passing over experienced insider men for an accessible outsider woman. In the end, he was right on one count: that a swath of the American public—though one which perhaps may not be wide enough to elect him tomorrow—felt so disenfranchised by the people who hold power in this country that they would line up behind someone who reflected and could articulate their own proud feelings of ordinariness. (This profound cultural conflict—rooted deep in issues of education and economics—will require far more systemic thinking than the fuzzy feeling of "unity" Obama hopes to usher in tomorrow and beyond.) Where McCain may have been wrong—and this is big—was in his perception of this election as a game of identity politics.
People have talked plenty about whether Obama is a post-race candidate for a post-race America. I've generally taken issue with that notion—and should he be elected, my heart positively swells with the notion of the descendant of slaves raising her children inside the White House. But by the same flawed token, did Sarah Palin become a post-gender candidate for a post-gender America? Of course, Palin has certainly worked her gender in this race: from that flirty wink and sky-high Manolos to her uber-mom positioning. But like Obama's race hasn't been the totalizing meta-narrative of his candidacy, neither has Palin's gender, and just as this hasn't been an election year for single issue voters, it hasn't been one for single-identity ones either, despite what pundits may have predicted from the outset. We entered this race all aflutter about our first female presidential candidate. We're ending it considering the next one with hardly a shrug about her gender.
While I am hardly a Palin fan, and for myriad reasons shudder to imagine how she might develop with the next four years to study up, the fact that neither her supporters nor her detractors seemed to make a big deal about a female commander in chief (remember those days?) suggests that in unexpected ways, we've come a long way during this long march to Election Day.
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I'm coming late to the conversation about Sarah Palin's Saturday Night Live appearance, so I'll try not to be too repetitive. My take-away was similar to Meghan's—that Alec Baldwin personified all the unpleasant things that have said about Palin, especially the over-the-top stuff, and she was tough enough to take it. And I thought the rap was funny, though maybe, as Hanna pointed out, it's a generational thing and kids today might not have found it so entertaining.
One thing I wanted to address was the whole "hotness" issue. Emily, you point out that the governor is "down with with the Palin dudes who wear ‘Proud to be voting for the hot chick' buttons," and Maureen suggests it's fair game for Palin to be mocked for her sexuality when she's used it to her advantage.
Is a candidate supposed to hide her good looks just because she's a woman? Sure, like Maureen says, if she uses it, she risks it being used against her. I think Palin can take it. I remember reading praise of Hillary for her "serious" pant suits and businesslike appearance. Look, I would never vote for Hillary, but I can't help but have respect for her after her presidential campaign. And I understand why she went for businesslike and proper. But I don't understand why that has to be the only choice for female politicians. Worrying over whether she can handle fake ogling and stressing that men are pointing out her hotness make it seem like she should tone it down. But why can't women be hot and be taken seriously at the same time? Isn't that kind of sexist in its own way? (I'm also thinking of all the time people oohed and ahhed over Condi Rice's kick-butt power boots.) It's like saying only ugly girls can be smart. And hence, smart girls are ugly. Heck, I'm jealous. I hope I look half that good when I'm 44 (and I probably won't have just given birth, either).
At any rate, I'm far less worried about the guys wearing "voting for the hot chick" button than I am about these men—and women—and their extremely not-safe-for-work T-shirts.
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SNL may be mocking us mockers, but Palin is palling around with the SNL gang. So much for her status as the Outsider. What a brilliant way to co-opt the maverick—though as Hanna points out, Palin was eagerly colluding. Check out Jane Mayer's piece, "The Insiders,"in this week's New Yorker, about how McCain picked her in the first place: Palin had been very busy schmoozing with boatloads of Washington insiders. Isn't the real story here that Palin the small-town gal isn't about to pass up any opportunity to mingle with the plugged-in political and media crowd?
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Apparently I am the last person in the developed world without a DVR. In any case, I have only just now caught up with the Sarah Palin SNL sketches, via all of your links and the discussion thread. It was a little jerky on my computer, and I almost immediately read the thread of conversation, so take this with a grain of salt—but what struck me most forcefully was how *little* Palin there was. She had almost no lines. Did she (or the SNL team) think she couldn't carry them off? Was she simply standing there, hitting her mark without moving, because her campaign told her she had to? She looked to me as if she was just a prop for everyone else's admittedly limp comedy.
I like Anne's idea that it's laudable that American politicians can laugh at themselves. But I'm not sure this showed that Palin can. Remember the 2000-election Al Gore? I thought that, when not doing her own attack material, she was a little ... wooden.
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Emily, you lament that "a woman running for vice president has to come in for face-to-face ogling by a bore of an actor on national TV." I think, as you said in referring to Dahlia's earlier point about not blaming her male keepers for silencing her, that we can all agree that she's a big girl and that she doesn't have to do anything. She went on the show to demonstrate that she's a good sport; she achieved that. But I do think that when you've used your sexuality as a campaign tool as much as she has, you're fair game for that kind of mock ogling—which is mock after all.
When I think of Sarah Palin, I keep coming back to the vice-presidential debate and her winking. For days after that, I kept thinking that if she had been debating another woman who wasn't using the same tactics of using sex appeal, she would have looked even more ridiculous than she did already. As it was, she was up against old man Biden, and as much as I don't agree with the tactic (since it sends the message that those are the tools that women need to use to get ahead, that we don't consider ourselves on a level playing field without them), it's her prerogative to use it, and I'm sure it does work for some people (mostly men, according to this—go figure). I just think once you go down that road on the national stage, you're fair game to have that mocked. Heck, when your own running mate touts you—proudly—as a "direct counterpoint to the liberal feminist agenda," do you really even want the protection that other feminists seem willing to afford you from being so ogled? Whether we should extend it is another question—and in doing so, Emily, I think you're much more charitable than I am. I think she's pretty well set herself up for the ogling—and the mockery that ensues.
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I'm with Meghan here. I also thought the skit was quite brilliant. The audience SNL was targeting is not made up of Palin voters but of people like us. They didn't demean her; they colluded with her to make fun of us and all our "I'm moving to Canada" blather. And Baldwin's about-face was perfect, too, because even when faced with the real her he couldn't think of anything respectful to say, but reverted to the other form of Palin mockery—the how-hot-is-she variety. They were deeply mocking the Palin mockers, which I thought was quite brave.
I even thought the rap was—dare I say it—great. "I say Obama. You say Ayers." Come on, that's funny. Even the moose part—a stroke of genius to parallel the gang banger with the moose hunter. But then, as my husband said, we are of a generation that considers rap satire to be a form of high art. It beat those pretentious Obama celebrity ads.
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Is anyone but me freaked out by the fact that the big punch line of Palin’s SNL performance was “Hee hee hee, I am never going to give a real press conference?” Her line to Lorne Michaels, “You know, Lorne, I just don't think it's a realistic depiction of the way my press conferences would have gone,” nearly led me to knock over a basket of poorly folded laundry. A candidate who has made herself all but unavailable for rigorous media questioning is cracking wise about how a press conference “would have gone” and this is funny? Her concluding joke, “"No, I'm not going to take any of your questions, but I do want to take this opportunity to say, 'Live from New York, it's Saturday Night,’ ” was only a joke in that it was totally true. Auggggggghhhh!!!!
Why is that funny?????
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Dearest Scold, I figured you were joking that scold plus flurge equaled scourge! (I know, that's what I get for thinkin'. ...) But the point I was trying to make was that like Alessandra, I thought Palin's willingness to boogie said much more about her Big Future in TV than her questionable one in politics. And I'm not sure it has any bearing on the future of women in politics; we are not that easily set back, are we?
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Step back and think about it, Dahlia, Melinda, Emily, et al.: Sarah Palin pretending to enjoy a comedy rap at her expense, McCain and Obama howling with laughter at jokes about Joe the Plumber and Obama's middle name—isn't this whole phenomenon rather odd? What other country demands that its political leaders have not only policy prescriptions, rhetorical skill, good looks, and televisual charm but a well-honed sense of humor as well? In many cultures—including those of central Europe, whence I'm writing this—jokes are considered infantile. "Serious" politicians don't make them; national leaders don't laugh much on TV. And they certainly don't do stand-up comedy routines of the sort that both McCain and Obama carried off with such excellent timing at the Alfred E. Smith dinner last week. I made my (Polish) husband watch the video clips of both speeches, and he shook his head in wordless admiration.
It's an American strength, this ability our leaders have—occasionally—to laugh at themselves, to appear on Letterman or at the White House correspondents' dinner: It reflects the fact that politics in the United States isn't, as in many places, a matter of life or death: Whoever loses this election is not going to jail, and his followers will not be persecuted. It also means the political class has some healthy distance from what it does, at least a few nights a year.
Still, in order for this good humor to work, especially at the height of the election campaign, the joking has to be even-handed, the mockery bipartisan. Which the Al Smith dinner was, and the Palin SNL sketches were not. That is, Tina Fey was funny, Amy Poehler was funny, but Palin was not at all funny: She was uncomfortable, because all of the laughter was, in fact, at her expense. Her lame attempt to make fun of Fey's unwatched show was nowhere near as powerful as Fey's imitation of Palin's "pageant walk," and her determination to smile her way through the whole thing was impossible to watch. One almost felt sorry for her.
But yes, I laughed at the dancing moose.
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See, Meghan and Melinda, this is why I felt like a scourge fretting over those Palin SNL sketches (actually scold would have been a better choice of words, as a Slate colleague just pointed out). You're both decoding with greater sophistication than I am. I did get that Alec Baldwin was playing his 30 Rock character. I just didn't want him to do that to our potential vice president. Yes, it was funny, and her deadpan response was, too, but not funny enough to trump the grossness for me. Meghan, that's a great point about how Baldwin forced us to think about what we say about Palin behind her back by saying it to her face. But in the end, he was still insulting her while she listened. Which left her with no dignified ground to stand on, as Alessandra Stanley pointed out in the NYT. Maybe that's all well and good for democracy, writ small at least, because it's another data point about Palin before voters go to the polls. But when I pore over the Palin tea leaves for clues about the future of women in politics, I don't really like what I see.
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Emily, unlike you, I thought the first sketch on SNL was quite…brilliant. I was going to say I liked it, but that’s not exactly true. The bit where Alec Baldwin went on (in front of SNL producer Lorne Michaels) about how Sarah Palin was not someone “we” should associate with was designed to make us uncomfortable, and that’s what I admired about it. It was digging at how political discourse in this country has become bifurcated. And it was pointing to how profoundly many of have grown isolated within our clans of like-minded people (especially in Hollywood and in the entertainment media). The cost of getting Sarah Palin to NYC to perform on SNL: a couple hundred dollars, say. Making us watch as Baldwin accidentally said to her face all the things “we” have said to our friends dissecting the debates over drinks: priceless.
And as for the moment when Baldwin crudely looks her up and down—it’s gross, to be sure, but I thought it was a self-conscious riff on his character on 30 Rock, who’s always manhandling Tina Fey (and every other female he comes in contact with)with his eyes. He was being gross in character, I’d say, and that’s what made it funny—the play off the way he is with Tina Fey, and all the odd levels that go into that: the fact that Tina Fey is a feminist-minded type, first, and the fact that Palin is a tough gal who can take it, second. Baldwin’s supposed to seem ridiculous, and by implication so is the whole culture of spectatorship, I think. Of course, SNL went on to implicate us in that culture of spectatorship, so one could continue to spin out the iterations. But I found that skit kind of gutsy on everyone’s part.
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Like W., I squint when I'm puzzlin' -- and so have whole new frown lines from trying to make sense of the McCain-Palin game plan. Last night, though, while watching Saturday Night Live, the light finally dawned: They have either a) totally given up; b) lack the common sense God gave a moose (a creature that will forget you are there if you duck behind a tree for three seconds); or c) have a vice-presidential nominee more interested in her close-up than in closing the deal with voters.
Only that last one would explain how much Palin was enjoying grooving on TV while Amy Poehler did the "Sarah Palin rap,'' to lyrics like "I'm Jeremiah Wright cuz tonight I'm the preacha, I got a bookish look and you all hot for teacha.'' For me, this shined a whole new (softer, but also dimmer) light on all her mugging and smiling while whipping crowds up with hateful distortions about Barack Obama. Because there she was, mugging and smiling while Poehler stopped just short of grabbing her crotch, Eminem style, and rapped that McCain's "smile be creepy.'' So...maybe girlfriend just likes the camera? Like you, Emily, I was squirming through the whole first skit, too -- only I was thinking oh, how demeaning for Alec Baldwin.
Remember when Al and Tipper Gore did that hot tub skit on SNL - and how clear that made it that he really wasn't going to run in ‘04? I had that same feeling watching Palin - that no one who thought they had a serious shot would be so comfy so far over the line.
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I feel like a scourge for saying so, but I'm queasy about Sarah Palin's appearance on Saturday Night Live this weekend. Tina Fey continued her genius star turn as the governor, and the moment in which she and Palin passed each other, in their identical red suits and stacked hair-dos, was spine-tingling--the perfect update of those fabulous double-takes on The Love Boat when two washed-up former stars from the same dead TV show met up at the buffet table. And yet, for me none of this quite made up for Alec Baldwin in the first skit and then for the out-of-control unfunny disaster of the second. I cringed for Palin while Baldwin talked trash about her without looking her in the eye. It got worse when he ended with "you...are WAY HOTTER in real life," looking her up and down with an hourglass beaming out of his eyeballs. So a woman running for vice-president has to come in for face-to-face ogling by a bore of an actor on national TV? And then for gamely clapping along while Amy Poehler plays her, sort of, by charging around on stage, rapping (if it can be called that) in overdrive to unfunny lyrics, flanked by a guy dressed like a Todd Palin prop and two other guys doing who knows what? And that was before the moose even showed up.
No, I don't think this is the charming and harmless Palin equivalent of Obama Girl. Much as I wish otherwise, it still means something different for a male politician to be treated as a sex object than for a female one to be. Plus Obama is in no danger of being reduced to his sex appeal, whereas Palin may well be when the election is over. I don't mean to excuse her; as Dahlia has reminded us, she's a grown-up candidate who makes her own choices. She didn't have to sit still for all this. I also get why commentators called the whole thing a "win-win." Yep, she proved she's hip enough to do late-night, and that she's down with the Palin dudes who wear "Proud to be voting for a hot chick" buttons. Terrific.