A guy I know who was early on convinced that McCain picked Palin to get the female vote gloatedly sent me links to polls that tied her nomination into a major jump in the numbers of women who suddenly looked with favor on his candidacy.
"And women are so stupid, they fell for it!" he exclaimed in digust, ready to blame women if Obama loses.
There has been a sense among liberal/progressive men and even some women looking at these startling polls that the world has turned upside down, that women who would have and should have known better seem to have tossed their values and beliefs to one side just so they can vote for a woman at the top of the national ticket, a response I must say was entirely missing in 1984 when Democratic nominee Walter Mondale named Geraldine Ferraro as his running mate.
Salon's Rebecca Traister is one of those women and wrote about her own surprising response with as much clarity and honesty as we're likely to get.
My feelings about Palin have everything to do with her gender -- a factor that I have always believed, as a matter of course, should neither amplify nor diminish impressions of a person's goodness or badness, smartness or dumbness, gravitas or inconsequence. Why are my rules changing?
***
Perhaps it's because the ground has shifted so quickly under my feet, leaving me with only a slippery grasp of what the basic vocabulary of my beat -- feminism, women's rights -- even means anymore. Some days, it feels like I'm watching the civics filmstrip about how much progress women made on the presidential stage in 2008 burst into flames, acutely aware that in the back of the room, a substitute teacher is threading a new reel into the projector. It has the same message and some of the same signifiers -- Glass ceilings broken! Girl Power! -- but its meaning has been distorted. Suddenly it's Rudy Giuliani and Rick Santorum schooling us about pervasive sexism; Hillary Clinton's 18 million cracks have weakened not only the White House's glass ceiling, but the wall protecting Roe v. Wade; the potential first female vice president in America's 200-year history describes her early career as "your average hockey mom" who "never really set out to be involved in public affairs"; and teen pregnancy is no longer an illustrative example for sex educators and contraception distributors but for those who seek to eliminate sex education and contraception.
It is as if The Handmaid's Tale and Orwell's 1984 had fused into a single book and been brought to life by Darth Vader and Voldemort. Everything is its own evil twin. Digby, writing about Traister's article, says, "Bushian epistomological relativism has finally hit the culture wars."
Politically, this is incredibly easy of course. Palin is just another anti-intellectual, hypocritical, right wing freakshow, to whom I react with the same level of shock and disgust as I did when I first saw George W. Bush. Here's someone who has no more business running for high office than my cat. It's mind boggling that our system seems to regularly produce such candidates --- and that they have such appeal. It makes you question democracy itself. But Palin is riding in on the hopes and aspirations of generations of women and to have the "first" be someone who has been chosen in order that feminism itself could be used as a shield for social conservatism and retrograde policies is almost too much to take.
I always thought the first female president would be a Republican. It's a Nixon goes to China thing. Only a Republican female could be assured of not being gender-baited by Republicans. But I assumed she would be someone of stature and accomplishment --- that they'd demand that much, if only for their own sense of pride. But they have so lowered their standards and bastardized the presidential campaign into a sort of professional wrestling match, that they don't feel the need to present any candidate of substance.
I'll go further and say Saint Sarah is a requirement. She is a major distraction in a campaign that the GOP can only win if voters' attention and focus can be successfully misdirected away from its monstrous failure at every level since 1980. All the "successes" it has been crowing about since Reagan have, now that the tide has come in, turned out to be illusions built on sand and scraps of paper, no more real than a Road Runner cartoon.
Because they have to be illusions.
The Republican agenda is profoundly unAmerican, anti-democratic, and oligarchic in nature. Movement conservatives worship and do their best to emulate the likes of Juan Peron and Augusto Pinochet. Conservative icons like Karl Rove and Grover Norquist, and even muddle-headed hacks like Rick Santorum and Tom Coburn, have said repeatedly what fans they are of the Roman Empire. They think of democracy in terms of "the rabble", "the mob", "the hoi-polloi".
If most of us knew what the real Republican agenda was, we'd run away in horror. We don't because the GOP always makes sure there is a Palin-esque distraction to keep us looking in the other direction.
The choice of Palin doesn't prove how open-minded they are but how desperate they are. Their other distractions weren't working and McC was fading into the background like a wallflower at the Hop. Worse, people were actually starting to pay attention to the mess conservatives have made of this country after nearly 30 unbroken years of rule. That couldn't be allowed.
Thus Palin, Sarah the Superdistraction. Clearly, it's working.
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