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Hanna,
Thanks for your post on Sarah Palin. It's funny: I was at the polls today, doing my mundane but important civic duty, coloring in all the circles completely like a student taking a standardized test and reading the language of all the amendments and issues carefully to make sure a "yes" was a yes and a "no" was a no. But as I was going over my ballot (before feeding it into a box that looked mysteriously like a paper shredder), I paused on Sarah Palin's name right there under John McCain's, and just a bit of emotion welled up in me. There was a spring in my step as I walked back to my car. After all my doubts and confusion, I was excited and a little proud to be voting for her.
Believe me, I'm someone who abhorred the "PC tokenist ‘90s," and god knows that I would never vote for a woman just because of her gender. I don't know what tonight will bring, and I'm not overly optimistic. But I think that you're exactly right that she's bigger than some of her low moments and bigger than the wardrobe. Maybe even bigger than the campaign. If she and McCain lose tonight, she might take some hits for a while. But there will be a lot of blame to go around, and she won't get all of it. And, like Tina Fey's Sarah Palin said on Saturday Night Live in that QVC skit, "I'm not going anywhere." Speaking of which, where can I get one of those "Palin in 2012" T-shirts?
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Ah, the irony of the sexy librarian inquiring whether it's legal to ban books.
What I was initially getting at was less how Sarah Palin defines herself and more how our culture has responded to those definitions. For example, in all the McCain blame-game conversations that are emerging in the press today--like this one by Slate's Christopher Beam--there's a total absence of hand-wringing of the were we ready for a female VP? variety. Of course, had Palin been more prepared for the job, that conversation may be a different one: Her inexperience and incuriousity have been a great leveler.
I'm happy that the McCain flame-out discussion doesn't imply we wait another 24 years for a female candidate, as we have since Ferraro. Hanna suggests, and I agree, that Palin will gain mastery in the political game--at least as it plays out in mass culture if not in policy discussion. But the specter of a post-Palin America, as Hanna put it, with our most famous Alaskan annointed as the lone figure to be reckoned with? That strikes me as just the sort of future celebrity candidacy Obama unfairly had to shake. Normalizing the concept of women in our highest offices? It's about time. Normalizing Palin as the best shot at female leadership? Thanks but no thanks.
Perhaps before I get all worked up about 2012, I should get through tonight. But it's certainly intriguing to consider what this two-year campaign has laid out for the road ahead. Looking at the ballot in my polling booth this morning, I flashed back to the beginning of this relentless, seemingly endless trip. Back then I wouldn't have believed the choices we have had the opportunity to make today.
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I think we're talking about some quality of Palin's we haven't pinned down yet. I've talked to some women who thought her performance on the prank call, and then on SNL last night, made her seem small, and defeated. And that they felt sorry for her. I felt just the opposite. I thought she sounded almost regally bored on the phone call, and poised on the SNL clip in a way that suggested she has already figured out every part of the game - the irony, the self mockery, the great American path to fame. Under the normal rules, Palin's future is punching bag for the Republican Party, the McCain campaign has already started some of that finger-pointing. But you sense that she'll resist it and make her own rules. They wanted her to be a token and she stole the show. In that way, she is post-feminist, shoving hidebound politics past the PC, tokenist '90s and straight into 2008. Even if they do lose, she still feels larger than the prank call, larger than the wardrobe controversy, larger than the campaign. Yes, her wink-wink, ain't I pretty thing has been central, but I bet as an icon of the right, she'll transcend that without quite shedding it, in the way Nina describes.
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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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Lauren, your post about Palin and Obama got me thinking. As I’ve always understood the concept of “post-race,” it isn’t really about being past race. Race isn’t something you can transcend. But it is something you can bend and complicate—especially if you’re as charismatic and talented as Obama is.
I remember first hearing the term “post-black” in 2001, when Thelma Golden curated Freestyle at the Studio Museum in Harlem, featuring artists who were, in Golden’s words, “adamant about not being labeled ‘black’ artists, though their work was steeped, in fact deeply interested, in redefining complex notions of blackness.” That was the same year that Rolling Stone published the article “To Be Gay at Yale,” in which many of my classmates spoke about how their queer identity had become “backgrounded”—i.e., it was still an important part of how they conceived of themselves, but it was no longer necessarily the most important part. They were, in a word, post-gay.
Ever since then I’ve found the phrase “post-race” to be a useful one, personally. I’m a biracial woman who’s very attached to the immigrant communities I grew up in—someone who thinks about race a lot—but my skin color is not always in the forefront of my mind when I interact with the world.
So to me, Obama is absolutely a post-race candidate. He’s the quintessential post-race candidate, even! Here’s a man with roots in Kenya and Indonesia, in Hawaii and South Side Chicago, and though by all accounts his sense of himself has evolved over time (“struggled with his identity”—ick, I hate that phrase), he now seems totally at ease with his complicated self. Being post-race, to me, means wearing yourself a little more lightly.
So is Sarah Palin post-gender? I’m not entirely sure, but my instinct says no. Too much of her public persona seems to rotate between performances rooted in gender roles—the flirt with the high heels or the über-mom, as you point out, or the Ann Coulter-style mean girl or the sexy Puritan, as other Slate writers have noted. Is it the calculatedness I’m responding to? Her eagerness to put on a show for us? I was going to say that it’s because she was chosen for the ticket simply because she’s a woman, but that’s not quite right since she’s obviously proven to be a charismatic, electrifying politician, as well. I confess I’m stumped.
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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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