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Hmmm, the top 10 worst political campaign ads ever? The bottom 10, I guess you'd say? Rachael, yer on:
10) OK, in the spirit of comity, let's start with an attack ad against a Republican, Colorado Rep. Marilyn Musgrave. I know you'd agree she's kinda out there, what with her famous charge that the number-one threat facing America is gay marriage. Still, this '04 ad featuring a Musgrave impersonator picking the pocket of an American soldier in the middle of a firefight is beyondo. (I also much enjoyed a ridiculous '06 radio ad against Musgrave that I can't find a link to, blasting her for leaving the scene of a fender bender: "Hit and run, cut and run; that's Marilyn Musgrave.'' Whatever.)
9) One classic of the genre is the Willie Horton ad—murdering black inmate turned loose!—that George W.'s daddy ran against Michael Dukakis in '88. Thanks to Al Gore, who raised Horton's early release from prison as an issue during the Democratic primary.
8) And Gore knew from negative campaigning, too, because that's how his dad got taken out. Richard Nixon ordered a political hit job on Tennessee Sen. Albert Gore Sr. over his opposition to the Vietnam War. So in 1970, his opponent used the racist shout-out "Bill Brock Believes the Things We Believe'' on highway billboards, referring to Gore's refusal to sign the segregationist Southern Manifesto.
7) In that same vein, can't exclude this lovely George Wallace ad from '68.
6) Or the attack on Vietnam vet Max Cleland's patriotism by Saxby Chambliss, who looks like he's going down on Tuesday.
5) The Swift boat lies about John Kerry still make me bananas.
4) But the ads Jerry Kilgore ran against death penalty opponent Tim Kaine in their '05 Virginia gubernatorial race backfired, just like Dole's "Godless'' ad has. Particularly offensive was the Kilgore ad claiming that Kaine would keep even Hitler from paying the ultimate price. Oh, and Kilgore gave the whole thing an extra kick by first airing it on Yom Kippur.
3) Republican Doug Forrester's '05 ad against Jon Corzine in the New Jersey gubernatorial race used a quote from the ex-Mrs. Corzine that the louse had "let his family down, and he'll probably let New Jersey down, too."
2) Will Hillary's 3 a.m. ad stand the test of time? I think so.
1) But still the champ: The "Daisy'' ad LBJ ran in '64 against Goldwater, who in light of his daughter's revelation that he helped her get an abortion a few months before her wedding might now be considered too socially liberal to be nominated by his party.
So is my list skewed by partisanship, or have there been equally appalling attacks by more Democrats than are leaping to mind? I would have included the "John McCain has a black love child' push-polling ahead of the 2000 Republican primary in South Carolina, but technically those weren't ads—and aren't some of the guys who masterminded that smear working for him now? I am thinking I should have found room for the one with the blonde babe telling Tennessee's Harold Ford to call her, but if I go beyond 10, I'll be at this 'til Election Day.
Given how many of these doozies played to racial fears, maybe the fact that McCain's ads haven't been even as overt as Hillary's 3 a.m. ad in that regard means his advisers didn't think they would work, so that's a hopeful sign. And while five of these 10 lulus hit their mark, most of the recent ones did not, so let's pray this turns into an honest-to-God trend.
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The good news is, we may finally have located the floor, the how-low-can-you-go spot where it's the negative campaigner who falls to the ground, embarrassed and wishing he or she had known the limits of voter tolerance for crazy ads. The bad news is, the gal down there on the linoleum with her Spanx showing is Sen. Elizabeth Dole, who should have opted for a classier exit from politics than this derriere-over-teacup insult to the believer's intelligence, an instantly notorious TV spot claiming that her Democratic opponent, Kay Hagan, met secretly with "Godless Americans'' and took "Godless money.'' Sure, because there were a couple of atheists among the several dozen people who hosted a fundraiser for her in Massachusetts. Unknown if any witches were on hand. Also unfortunate: Hagan felt, probably rightly, that she had to respond with an ad reassuring North Carolinians that she does believe in God and used to teach Sunday school. So should these two settle the race with a God-off Bible bee? God forbid.
Update: Incredibly, though Dole has taken a hit in the polls since putting up the first ad, she's just responded to Hagan's defense with a second ad, Godless 2, in which a narrator asks, "If Godless Americans threw a party in your honor, would you go?'' Maybe; would there be cake?
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Excellent post, Melinda! Are you starting a contest to ferret out the scummiest campaign tactic? Because that could keep us busy from now until Tuesday, when we'll be sitting around twiddling our thumbs and waiting for the exit polls. I think your Elizabeth Dole ad wins because it's a national race, but I've got my own little submission for scummiest campaign claim, even though it's not an ad. (Hat tip to Joel Mowbray at Townhall.com.)
Josh Mandel is a young Republican (wow, I feel old) who won a spot in Ohio's General Assembly in 2006, representing a heavily Democratic district in Cleveland. He was a former Marine who had served in Iraq. In 2007, the Marines asked him to voluntarily re-enlist. As he puts it, "I didn't join the Marine Corps to say no when my country called." So he went, and he returned home in April of this year. Now, up for re-election, challenger Bob Belovich is questioning his dedication to his constituents, and Belovich's wife admits she told voters that Mandel went "AWOL." She also said at a Democratic event that "Josh Mandel isn't serving our country; he's serving George Bush."
And this YouTube video features an audio clip of Belovich, best I can tell, accusing Mandel in his first campaign of trying to hide his party affiliation and capitalize on his "Jewish" name.
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I'm a pregnancy cliché, much of the time. Weepy one moment (hello, Obama-mercial), enraged the next (did you forget to buy milk!?). Most of the time I can ignore the emotional lability or laugh about it. But sometimes that righteous ire is for good reason. The obscene amount of unsolicited advice one receives, for example—all aimed at some kind of collective fetus care that totally eclipses the rights of an individual. (The other day a complete stranger reminded me I shouldn't take "hot baths" lest I hurt my child. Thank you!) But much more importantly: the legistlative means states have taken to ensure fetal rights.
Last night I received a new short video produced by the National Advocates for Pregnant Women that narrates the full impact the various fetal rights initiatives on ballots next week will have if they pass (it's six minutes but it's at minute one that the really intense bits creep in, after the pitch to vote "no"). Colorado has Prop 48, a definition of personhood amendment (McCain has come out in favor of it), which would define life—and, most importantly, human rights—as beginning at the moment of conception. South Dakota has measure 11, mostly banning abortion. Normally these measures are seen as simply means of chipping away at abortion rights, and it's true that's part of their intended impact. In the video Lynn Paltrow, executive director at the NAPW, explains how these amendments end up compromising the bodily integrity of all pregnant women.
NAPW is part of a grassroots movement of women from both sides of the abortion debate who are arguing for the rights of pregnant women not to be ignored or overtaken by fetal rights—something that sounds inherently intuitive but is, in many states, painfully most definitely not. In a letter to the editor of the New York Times two weeks ago, Paltrow explained that "Such measures are used to control, and sometimes punish, women who do not want unnecessary Caesarean surgery; who want to have vaginal births after previous Caesarean surgery; women who love their children but can't necessarily overcome a drug or alcohol problem in the short term of a pregnancy; and women who suffer unintentional stillbirths."
In the video, vignettes give anecdotes about the consequences of these legislative interventions: like the case of Amber Marlowe who, in 2004, discovered Pennsylvania had the right to represent the right of her fetus when her hospital, determining the baby would be too large to deliver vaginally, got a court injunction that superseded Amber's rights for the child, forcing legal, surgical intervention. Amber fled the scene and delivered without complication elsewhere. Laura Pemberton, in Florida, was arrested, put in handcuffs, and forced to have a ceasearan. Both women consider themselves pro-life and both were caught in the peculiar dragnet of fetal rights.
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Can I just say I am loving reading Bill Bishop on Slate? Every song is a dance. Today, however, my already acute "Big Sort" confusion grows as he explains that conservatives are more apt to be neat freaks while liberals, who rarely iron, can go weeks without needing to know which stack of papers the cordless phone got lost in. (Dude, where is my corner? Is there such a thing as being un`sortable?) Often, I know, my difficulty with the majority view is plain contrarian; something about hearing that everybody knows X or thinks Y makes my throat scratchy, to the point that agreeing with so many people about Obama is slightly unnerving. (Oh to be you, Rachael!) Only, that wouldn't explain how I swung from conservative slob to silver-polishing liberal, would it? In my 20s, my sister once found my room in the apartment we shared in such disarray that she called 911—and I arrived home to find a police officer standing in my personal space: "Ma'am,'' he informed me, "this place has been ramshackled." No, actually, it was just as I'd left it. So, hasn't recycling made anybody else increasingly fastidious? And I'm curious; how are the rest of you sorting out?
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Like Meghan, I too loved the aesthetic of the infomercial. It had all of the Horatio Alger glory of an NBC Olympic-hopeful hagiography, spliced with the better cinematography of great Hollywood. You know in those movies the good guys always win, and yet I cry every time. Beyond family values, Obama underscored again what's been his hallmark since 2004: unity. That Boston speech never fails to move me. It's about refusing to use the politics of division to win. McCain, to his discredit and to his detriment, has never picked up on the yearning the vast majority of this country has to be more alike than different, more unified in a goal toward betterment. I'm a little sappier these days, but I think that I'm not alone in that sentiment. It's why Obama's appeal in the infomercial to all our immigrant roots works. Bill Richardson mentions it toward the end of the segment—the importance, and uniqueness, of Obama's efforts toward unity: racial, political, economic, historic. The other night on Hardball, a McCain flack pooh-poohed the idea of unity as a "platitude." But I don't think it is. Sure, he hammers on it a lot, but Obama's efforts to sew this country together—and his genuine intellectual curiosity (as opposed to what scares me most about Palin, to go back to Meghan's earlier post: her Bush style lack of curiosity and what appears to be a disinterest in seeing beyond the world she currently lives in), has always made him the most attractive of candidates.
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Meghan, that's an inspired allusion. You're totally right about the aesthetics of the Obama infomercial—and there was even the football practice scene. No wonder I, like you, was drawn in; I'm a huge Friday Night Lights fan. Did you notice, as I did, what a notable contrast in content there was, though? One central theme of the Obama ad was cohesive families doing their best for their kids. That's exactly what is so glaringly not in evidence on FNL, as Sara Mosle noted in her great piece about the show: Coach Taylor and his wife, Tami, with their high-achieving daughter, are the anomalies in Dillon, Texas. I've been struck lately by how often I've heard Obama sound the note of parental responsibility, a theme he's stuck with very consistently, and is—I think—great at pushing, not stuffily but urgently. The government is here to help in various ways, but you've got to turn off the TV set and help the kids with their homework: that's the message. (Only tonight, of course, he was hoping the tube was on.)
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Just watched the Obama infomercial. The folksy veneer verged at times on seeming condescending (c.f. the knotted pine in the office, etc.), and the language was pretty plain: Obama mosty offered up boilerplate about his positions. But visually it was great. Davis Guggenheim, the director, used a lot of moody atmospheric shots intercut with footage of "average" Americans struggling to make ends meet. Guggenheim's father was Robert F. Kennedy's campaign documentarian. But surely Guggenheim had also taken a page or two out of Peter Berg's book. To me, the most striking thing about the ad was this: All the Friday Night Lights echoes. The handheld camera, the long shots from the inside of a car, swiveling forward through the passing landscape—which were that show's hallmark. And the music at times sounded like Explosions in the Sky, the band that did the soundtrack for the movie and TV version of Friday Night Lights. It makes sense: Friday Night Lights captures a particular blend of optimism and gritty realism that I think is what Obama is after. But I'm a sucker for this aesthetic; I wonder what others made of it.
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This whole debate about Lafferty's piece in the Daily Beast raises a question for me: Does it matter whether Palin is a feminist or not? Isn't it possible that she could be a net benefit for feminism without being one? I, too, am bothered by Palin's politics on a number of women-related issues, from abortion to abstinence-only sex ed. But before I go to the "she's terrible for feminism" place, I think of two 9-year-old girls I know, and I try to see this from their perspective. This is the first election they're really going to remember. And what they'll remember is that Hillary Clinton very nearly was the Democratic presidential candidate and that Sarah Palin was a dynamic, funny, personable VP candidate. Hopefully, they'll come of age thinking such an accomplishment for women is, if not normal, at least possible. Hopefully, they WON'T remember this campaign as the moment they realized there's a profound double standard for women--namely, that female candidates are criticized with more vigor than male candidates.
The problem that Lafferty doesn't acknowledge, alas, is that all these issues are tied together. It has to be fair for liberal feminists to criticize Palin on the basis of her positions, as Emily points out. At the same time, though, there's plenty of latent sexism tinging the discourse. Lafferty lumps all this together, which doesn't help further the debate. No doubt Palin is smart; but what troubles a lot of voters is whether she's intellectually curious and whether she's open to debate and advice. And as Ann pointed out, deeming a woman a "brainiac" after one plane ride smacks of overcompensation.
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In Rachael's battle between who is speaking more truth to power--Elaine Lafferty or Christopher Buckley--I think the real winner may be Tina Brown. Both articles by Lafferty and Buckley, which have inspired a lot of Web chatter, appeared in Brown's new Web site, the Daily Beast (named after the news outlet in Evelyn Waugh's novel Scoop.) Brown, of course, famously saved or ruined The New Yorker, depending on your point of view, in the early 1990s, after she created the still-successful formula for Vanity Fair. I worked at The New Yorker, briefly, during her reign and was among those who felt she was often unfairly maligned because of her sex. Rosa's insight--that pretty women are typically more successful than their less attractive counterparts but also punished more harshly when they fail--seemed to apply a lot to Brown at the time and may explain why she was eventually drawn to the subject of Diana, Princess of Wales (and is now working on a book about Hillary and Bill). In fact, many of the writers that define the current New Yorker are ones Brown hired and first brought to national prominence: among them, Lawrence Wright, Anthony Lane, John Cassidy, Malcolm Gladwell, Phillip Gourevitch, Larissa MacFarquhar, and David Remnick himself (who became her successor). One of my personal favorites of Brown's discoveries was Nancy Franklin, then a staff editor at the magazine. Previous male bosses had overlooked Franklin's considerable talents. Brown, however, saw a natural wit and born writer and promoted Franklin to critic, a post she still winningly occupies.
Brown had a keen appreciation of the sexism that surrounded her--especially the ways women were expected to work like dogs (as Brown did) while many of the men got to lounge around being "intellectuals." Upon learning I grew up in Texas, she once joked to me that she loved Texas men because unlike most of her male literary peers in New York, they were still man enough to flirt with her. In today's political vernacular, Texas men were "dudes," unintimidated by a woman who is both attractive and powerful. Brown's quip offered a brief glimpse into how sexually isolating it can be to be a fiercely intelligent woman. (I think this explains, in part, why otherwise seemingly smart women, especially of Hillary's generation, sometimes ended up with the Bills of the world: Bill was probably the first guy sexually acquisitive enough not to be put off by Hillary's own brains and star power.) I wonder if, at the Daily Beast, Brown hasn't found her natural home. She's surrounded by a younger generation of web-savvy male and female editors more used to smart, assertive women, and she always did love the outrageous, counterintuitive piece on which blogs depend. I, for one, am glad to have her back, mixing it up.
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Not surprisingly, I had a different take on Elaine Lafferty's column in the Daily Beast. That's not to argue with Sarah or Emily or Ann, it's just that I was looking for something different. But before I get to that, what strikes me as interesting is the treatment that Lafferty is getting from some on the left. Didn't many on the left just hold up Christopher Buckley as a hero for his speaking "truth to power" in HIS Daily Beast column where he came out for Obama? And wasn't everyone horrified by the name-calling he got on the right? I was. So how is it different when Jezebel tells Lafferty to go perform an anatomically impossible task? Neither of our two major parties is perfect, and when prominent figures use their influence to criticize their parties and say "Hey, you're not listening to me," it should serve as a wake-up call. It should prompt debate and soul-searching that would make the party stronger.
But, as for my take own on Lafferty: I was amused that she was mock-horrified to be agreeing with Fred Barnes because I had just read Barnes' own Palin-is-smart column in the Weekly Standard. I've been torn up about Palin. My initial reaction was one of extreme enthusiasm, which quickly became tempered by a serious case of longing for Mitt Romney as veep when she bombed her big media interviews, which in turn became relief when she did so well in the debate with Joe Biden. Also, my concerns over her lack of experience did battle with my excitement that there was a strong, dynamic conservative woman putting herself out there and going for the brass ring. It worried me when conservative intellectuals started breaking ranks, but I couldn't help remember seeing all the women at a Palin rally I covered and how excited they were. And, no, they weren't all the bible-beating, evangelical, social conservatives that she's supposed to get so worked up. There was a young, kinda hippie-ish couple with three little girls in pink Palin T-shirts, middle-aged women with teenage daughters, women in business suits, and moms in track suits.
So when I see positive reaction from people who would not normally be inclined to like her, I'm grateful. And frankly, if Sarah Palin is as smart as the people who get to know her say, it's something we should all be happy about. Unless women want to have yet another skirmish over who gets to call themselves a feminist and fight over whether abortion is a litmus test, it's a positive that there are smart, powerful women on both sides of our great ideological divide, fighting for what they believe in and setting examples for the women in their parties.
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I'm sure you all have seen this clip by now, of Barbara West, anchor at WFTV, Orlando, Fla., interviewing Joe Biden late last week. The whole interview is contentious but at 2:36 min she presents Biden with Karl Marx:
WEST: You may recognize this famous quote: "From each according to his abilities to each according to his needs." That's from Karl Marx. How is Senator Obama not being a Marxist if he intends to spread the wealth around?
BIDEN: Are you joking? Is this a joke?
West goes on to ask Biden if Obama wants to turn America into a Socialist country "like Sweden."
Is it just me? Beyond the fact that we could learn a few things from Sweden (including but not limited to their unbelievably enviable relationship to family and child policies), have we lost all sense of history? This trope, pushed by Palin (if she mentions socialism one more time ...) among others, seems to be treading dangerously close to calling for a House Un-American Activities Committee. I've even had interactions with Republicans lately along the same lines. How will this country heal after the elections from these efforts to inject a 1950s-style distrust among Americans?
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I'm glad Ann brought up this piece by Elaine Lafferty. Her go-go enthusiasm for Palin is deeply peculiar and, I think, speaks to some deep tensions present in the women's movement—old guard vs. new, third wave vs. second wave—and some of the concerns feminists of all kinds had when it became clear Hillary Clinton's campaign wasn't heading to nomination night in Denver.
What bothers me about Lafferty's cheerleading is not simply that it's condescending—and that line Ann pulls out is particularly awful "... a mind that is thoughtful, curious, with a discernable pattern of associative thinking and insight"; what job doesn't require thoughtful curiosity?—but that it's also completely disingenuous. Lafferty is a consultant to the McCain-Palin ticket. She says it right up front, but somehow it's easy to forget as you make your way through the story. She came over to the campaign right after the Palin pick—a moment when the country barely knew the name of the governor of Alaska, let alone whether she was a "quick study" or a bumbling idiot. There is something disconcerting to me about seeing her sitting there, behind Palin, on stage as the candidate assumes a quasi-feminist stance and steals Hillary Clinton's lines about glass ceilings
And now Lafferty simultaneously mocks the so-called "inside the beltway feminist" establishment that shuns Palin for her Christian-political positioning but then uses her own insider feminist credentials (former Ms. editor) as a shield against any criticism that she's remotely swallowed the Kool-Aid on this one. It's not a critique, it's a turn-conventional-wisdom-on-its-ear essay designed to rile people up. Why else be so casually dismissive of the rape kit story and the book banning rumors? (Of the latter, Noam Scheiber's excellent piece on Palin explains her efforts quite clearly.) Does Lafferty really have such live-and-let-live relationship to Palin's positions on choice, feminism itself (Palin has recently rejected the label), and McCain's inability to support the Ledbetter Fairpay Act? I don't buy it.
Over at Jezebel there's an angry but cogent takedown of Ms. Lafferty and her strange tenure at Ms. If you click through the links to the New York Observer stories on Lafferty chafing against Eleanor Smeal and Gloria Steinem in her final days at Ms., it opens up a few other questions. Namely: While I think its essential to the future of feminism expands the definition of feminist beyond the white middle-class women who served as figureheads in the 1970s, upon reflection, why does this feel like Lafferty's means of getting in a few punches at her old colleagues?
Addendum: Emily's take below really cuts to the point. There are plenty of good feminist reasons beyond abortion to reject the McCain ticket. Lafferty has resorted to old bromides that just don't ring true.
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Good point, Ann. I found Lafferty's take on Palin tiresome for a different reason—it read to me like a rehash of the worst of the days of women beating one another up over Hillary Clinton's candidacy. I'm perfectly happy to be told that Palin is smart, since at the moment, I've started worrying that if McCain loses we're going to have to listen to some of his supporters blame a woman and her campaign's dumb idea of a $150,000 shopping trip. But Lafferty then trots out all the old horses: Feminists reject Palin "for the sin of being a Christian personally opposed to abortion." They "have been silent as Palin has been skewered in the old ways that female public figures are skewered, as well as a host of sexualized new ways as well." And they say she's not a feminist, Lafferty accuses.
Whatever. There are plenty of feminist reasons to oppose Palin no matter what you think about abortion, if you define feminism as advocating social policies that help women and families. Feminists haven't been silent about Palin and sexism, but some of them have wisely separated valid criticisms—she knows little about big important matters!—from the problematic put-downs. And sure, Palin can call herself a "conservative feminist." (Though has she actually used that term?) But is any of this an argument for why women, or anyone, should support her? At this point of One Week and Counting, that's the only debate that really matters.
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Debating Palin's wardrobe was fun, but now we're back to the woman herself. Does her "claim to fame [lie] in her repudiation of Clinton-type exceptionalism," as Judith Warner wrote in the New York Times Week in Review Sunday, or in being a "brainiac," as Elaine Lafferty, former Ms. editor-in-chief and longtime feminist, writes on the Daily Beast? At least the first can be supported with words from Palin herself. What's strange about Lafferty's praise is how, well, elitist—and even sexist—it sounds.
This former Hillary supporter pays tribute to "a mind that is thoughtful, curious, with a discernable pattern of associative thinking and insight. Palin asks questions, and probes linkages and logic that bring to mind a quirky law professor I once had." And for her clinching assessment, she invokes as a standard a down home man who kept his Harvard Law pedigree quiet: "Senator Sam Ervin, the brilliant strict constitutional constructionist and chairman of the Senate Watergate Committee whose patois included 'I'm just a country lawyer.' ... Yup, Palin is that smart."
This calibration of Palin's candle power is the result of one plane ride with the vice-presidential candidate. Am I wrong to think that a little more exposure might be required to thoughtfully assess a mind deemed so thoughtful and curious—-and that such a far-fetched comparison wouldn't get invoked for a man, at least not with a straight face? Like McCain's patronizing expressions of pride in his running mate, Lafferty's curiously condescending flattery helps explain the rogue impulse, I would say.
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I admit that lately I've been thinking more about clothes (and their symbolism) than issues, but in today's New York Times longtime religion reporter Laurie Goodstein writes about the various religious leaders descending on California in support of Proposition 8, a measure that would change the California Constitution to state "only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California," and reading it, I was jolted right back into the fray.
Back in 2004, campaigns against gay marriage were nearly as central to the Republican strategy as the Swift Boat smears and the Neiman Marcus/Saks shopping-spree-style stories of the day—like John Kerry's ill-timed windsurfing trips.That year the 11 state ballot initiatives banning same-sex marriage—all of which passed—were widely believed to be a key element in Karl Rove's strategy for flushing out Evangelicals and right-wing Bush supporters to the polls. Dems panicked at the time and didn't fight them hard enough—if at all—leaving statewide activists stranded as they went door to door with a message of equality.
This year the issue hasn't gone away—in fact, California, Arkansas, and Florida all have ballot initiatives that would restrict the rights of gay men and lesbians—but it's certainly deeper underground, despite, or more likely, because of, changes in the right-to-marry that took place this year in California and Connecticut. But recently, the McCain-Palin ticket has tried to revive the issue, unleashing Sarah Palin to The 700 Club, where she announced support for a Federal Marriage Amendment (which Sen. McCain himself has said he does not support). Currently, polls put support for California's version of the discriminatory measure a shade less than 10 percentage points behind.
Yesterday's San Francisco Chronicle gives a clue as to how the measure might be defeated this time: State Attorney Gen. Jerry Brown reworded the amendment to read "eliminates the right of same-sex couples to marry." With that wording, support for the measure immediately went down. Activists I spoke to in 2004 universally believed that a key to defeating the discriminatory measures were to find ways to convey to voters that this was a violation of their neighbor's rights—as opposed to the Evangelical and Republican positions that claimed gay marriage would undermine the marriages of straight voters. Those voters reached with the message that a ballot measure banning gay marriage was no better than creating a second-class citizenship—in other words, was inherently discriminatory—tended to vote no on the issue.
The big concern with California, and elsewhere, as Goodstein points out in the NYT, is that there tends to be a kind of Bradley Effect on gay issues: Voters are loathe to tell pollsters they plan to vote against their neighbor. But if Prop 8 is defeated, maybe Jerry Brown finally found out how to get that message across more broadly: Write the ballot truly explaining the amendment's intended impact, so voters are forced to face its intended bigotry.
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Last week I asked XX Factor's male readers to weigh in with thoughts about the suit Joe Biden wore to the VP debate. I was trying to see if we could redirect our dissection of Sarah Palin's wardrobe—to see whether men pay as much attention to male candidates' clothes as we were paying to Palin's. The unscientific answer is: yes. (Of course, this has nothing to do with what one feels about the sticker price of Palin's wardrobe. Not to mention the cost of her makeup artist.) Most of you thought Biden's suit probably cost about $1,000, observing that it was not a "bespoke" suit and that similar suits at Brooks Brothers cost a grand or so. But many of you pointed out, too, that it could easily be in the upper end of that range, costing as much as $5,000.
Some pointed observations along the way: One reader wrote that he found the cost of Palin's wardrobe shocking because he "expected that, as governor, she would already have some clothes that were acceptable for the campaign trail." Another thought the fuss over Palin wasn't particularly gendered; just think of the hoopla over John Edwards' $400 haircut. (Great comparison: He noted that if you got a $400 haircut every day for a year you'd still be about two weeks shy of spending $150,000. It sure can cost a lot to dress yourself as a woman—but sheesh, you gotta work to spend $150,000.)
A third reader said he didn't think that we'd ever spend this much time thinking about a man's wardrobe because we're "culturally conditioned to almost instinctively believe certain things about people based on their gender." And we pay more attention to women's clothes: Even places like Target and so on have more big-label names designing down-market fashion for women than they have for men. Yet another reader took this point even further, noting that men can wear a suit over and over where women can't. He calculated that Biden's outfit would cost $2,500 or so from Hickey Freeman (where Biden has said he likes to shop). But he noted that it can be worn over and over as a "uniform," where Palin's dresses can't. Ah, well. Did Hillary solve this all with the pantsuit, yet another wondered. What seemed frumpy now looks pragmatic.
Many thanks to all who wrote in. I know much more about men's clothes than I did five days ago.
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Are we really preparing to underwrite private insurance companies? I'm sorry, but when did they ever do that for us? In fact, I'd say their current symptoms involve a pre-existing condition, wouldn't you? If we're gonna nationalize this bunch of heartless scammers, mightn't this be an excellent moment to think seriously at last about a single-payer health care system? You gotta give John McCain and Sarah Palin credit for chutzpah, running around squawking that Barack Obama's health care plan is booga-booga scary socialist. But the idea that we should reserve our largesse for bean-counters looking for reasons to cut off benefits mid-chemo makes me feel Sicko.
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Michelle Obama has been called elitist, Cindy McCain spoiled, and Sarah Palin has been criticized for, well, everything. Jill Biden, on the other hand, has received very little press. Why? She's too busy teaching, according to a profile in the Washington Post.
Jill teaches English at a community college in Delaware four days a week. She has consistently distanced herself from her husband's name so as not to receive any special treatment. When asked, she tells her students she is a "relative" of Joe Biden's.
The story portrays her as a down-to-earth mother who's rather uncomfortable in the campaign spotlight. The profile pretty successfully makes the case that she is the one who most closely embodies middle-class values. Joe the Plumber, meet Jill the Teacher.
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Now wait a second. Just because that poster (in which cute hipster girls threaten to withhold sex unless their prospective partners vote Obama) has its roots in classical literature doesn’t mean that its vision of women's political power isn’t retrograde and sexist. Last I heard, women in ancient Greece had the same social status as slaves. Maybe this is a generational division, which I guess would put me, at 42, in the frowny-old-crone camp. But this idea of women as the coy vestal guardians of their own, er, temples, which will be tendered only in exchange for some sufficiently valuable transaction? Whether the object accepted in exchange is a vote for Obama, an end to the Peloponnesian wars, or a Fifth Avenue penthouse from Mr. Big, isn’t that vision of male-female relations just a little depressing?
To the extent I care about this poster at all (and really, I don’t—it seems like any neighborhood where its aesthetic would go over is already solidly pro-Obama anyway), I’d have to say, along with Salon’s (wonderful) Rebecca Traister, that it kind of makes me want to drown myself. Anyone care to toss me a lifesaver and drag me to shore?
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The popular notion that independent voters—who are more than 40 percent of undecided voters—are a collection of cranks and people so unable to choose properly that in the words of David Sedaris they would have trouble deciding between an airplane meal of chicken and the “platter of shit with bits of broken glass.” Independents don’t see it quite that way. According to a recent op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, being an independent—and I’m one—comes with a specific set of policy beliefs. As writer John Avlon enumerated them, I suddenly felt like the shunned kid at the school cafeteria who finds a table of similar misfits. Independent’s beliefs zigzag across party orthodoxy—we’re national security hawks and social liberals. So some of us are left having to choose a candidate who leaves us deeply uneasy on one of these fundamentals.
I’ve been concerned about Barack Obama’s praise for the criminal justice model of fighting terrorism; this model requires terrorists to act so that we can respond. But then I consider that I want abortion to be not only legal, but available. So I don’t want a president whose Supreme Court appointments might undo Roe v. Wade. Independents are weary of extreme partisanship. Everyone says that of course, it’s like saying you despise celebrity gossip. But obviously most Democrats and Republicans really don’t despise it, or else there wouldn’t be so much commentary along the Sedaris line above. Take the economic meltdown—both Democrats and Republicans pushed policies that lead to it—but no politician can say that. Perhaps the independents’ dilemma will solve itself with the rise in our numbers—Avlon says we have grown from 22 percent of voters in 1954 to about 44 percent today—and someday we will get a candidate of our own.
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Wow, forget medicine and law; I'm gonna push my girl toward beauty school, where the big bucks are. Here's where Sarah Palin's traveling makeup artist made more money than anyone else in the whole McCain-Palin campaign during the first two weeks of this month. According to the New York Times, Amy Strozzi, "who was nominated for an Emmy award for her makeup work on the television show 'So You Think You Can Dance,' was paid $22,800 for the first two weeks of October alone.'' Now that she's moved on to Project Runway, "the campaign categorized Ms. Strozzi's payment as "PERSONNEL SVC/EQUIPMENT." Does that mean the lipstick is included?
Either way, Sarah Palin's makeup artist makes more in a month than a lot of people make in a year. We are really veering toward Marie Antoinette land here, aren't we? With perfumed sheep down on the old faux farm? And if she wants to talk small towns, I'll see her and raise her, because where I come from, this lame non-explanation of the $150,000 the RNC spent on her new wardrobe would be considered worse than no explanation at all: "That is not who we are,'' she told the Chicago Tribune. "It's kind of painful to be criticized for something when all the facts are not out there and are not reported.'' Only, she didn't elaborate, didn't add or subtract any facts from our Escada-gate knowledge base at all, so her "denial'' is .. .denying what, exactly? "That whole thing is just, bad!'' she said of the uproar over her clothes. "Oh, if people only knew how frugal we are." OK, I'll bite: How frugal?
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Discussions of the recent update of Joan Baez’s anti-draft poster have so far barely mentioned is that while Baez may have been coy when she suggested that she’d only sleep with anti-draft men, she wasn’t being original. The same goes for her imitators.
Women have used abstinence as political leverage throughout feminist history. The tactic dates back as far as ancient Greece, where Aristophanes’ “Lysistrata” convinced Athenian senate wives to withhold sex until the end of the Peloponnesian War. Temperance Crusaders of the late 1800s were among the first American women to employ abstinence activism; compare the Baez poster and its remake to this turn of the century photograph of ladies in support of the slogan “Lips that touch liquor shall not touch ours.”
So the pro-Obama postergirls aren’t hawking their politics with some “tasteless” message. Their efforts aren't "cute" or childish when you consider that they’re contributing to an ongoing tradition that’s been around for generations and required much more layered creativity and historical consciousness than say, the Obama Girl.
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There's some debate going on in the female blogosphere over a group of young women in Brooklyn who created a provocative pro-Obama poster that states: "Girls say yes to boys who say Obama." The poster is a send-up of an anti-draft poster from the late '60s featuring Joan Baez and her sisters that read: "Girls say yes to boys who say no." While BUST gives the poster the nod, deeming it "cheeky" and "fun," Broadsheet declares it "boring, overdone sexual politics" and "kind of gross," with Rebecca Traister asserting: "[it] makes me want to drown myself." Meanwhile Jezebel's Jessica Grose shrugs her shoulders: "Personally, I think it's a little self-consciously cutesy, certainly derivative and ironically playing into outdated sexual mores, but ultimately harmless."
Perhaps Dahlia's nod to "generational division" is part of what's at work here. For the most part, the postfeminist generation has less of a problem uniting the political and the sexual, but some women seem to feel any overlapping of the two is deeply problematic. For my part, I thought the poster was amusing. At this point, I'm for anything that will put Obama in office.
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In one of the many Palin conversations at school pick-up today, someone was humming this tune, the lyrics to which are:
"I came from the people/They need to adore me. So Christian Dior me."
Most apt.
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Sara, I was intrigued by your post (Palin May Be Pretty, But Her Poll numbers Aren't) noting that Palin's "supposed sex appeal hasn't translated into more votes." I'm no Palin fan (though I can't get too worked up about the $150,000 wardrobe expenditure)—but I can't help wondering if Palin's sex appeal isn't actually hurting her, at this point.
I've blogged here before about the benefits—social and financial—our society hands out to those fortunate enough to be attractive. Reasearchers call it the "beauty premium." But ... it turns out that there's also a "beauty penalty." One 2006 study found that:
People are more likely to trust a pretty face, but when that trust is betrayed, the backlash can be ugly. ... Numerous studies have shown that attractive people generally make more money, get higher reviews from their supervisors and are viewed as being more intelligent and trustworthy. What surprised researchers in this study was that subjects deemed attractive also were penalized more harshly for failing to live up to expectations.
I wonder if that's what's happening to Sarah Palin now. Quoth the Sage:
For if that flower with base infection meet,
The basest weed outbraves his dignity:
For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds;
Lilies that fester, smell far worse than weeds.
Ahem.
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I've been trying to formulate an opinion about Sarah Palin’s new wardrobe, and I confess that the whole subject bothers me more than it should. On the one hand, I agree with the pragmatist bloggers that one needs to dress the part, and that faced with about six minutes in which to get Palin ready for her close-up, the RNC opted to throw money at the problem. (Anyone who saw the "before" snap of Palin in this baffling folk-elf outfit will understand that the woman needed at least some help.) On the other hand, I also agree with the purist bloggers that spending $150,000 on incredibly high-end designer duds not only looks bad to Joe the Plumber, but also turns Palin from Joe Sixpack into Empress Josephine. Still, the whole subject continues to make me queasy for some of the reasons Meghan explored: It is really, really different to be a woman in the public eye. The standards for looking “good” are completely unfair, and the stakes are vastly higher for failing to do so. We obsessed about John Edwards' haircut because a bad haircut truly wouldn’t have mattered. We obsessed over Hillary Clinton’s cleavage, or her pantsuits, or her highlights because they matter so much.
We could certainly wish that two kindly mice name Gus and Jacques had sewn all of Palin’s outfits for free on the night of Aug. 29, 2008, but maybe that whole Cinderella story says more about the relationship between women and beautiful clothes than we care to admit.
So I am going to have to side with the women (anyone notice a generational division opening up here?) who think that when it comes to looking up to the job, a girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do. Nevertheless, the whole Pygmalion subplot, wherein Palin is a life-sized "teachable" Barbie doll, continues to leave me cold.
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I agree with you, Meghan, that woman have never settled on a comfortable uniform for power. And that opens up all kinds of possibilities. But they are not all bad. Think about it this way. We don't talk about every powerful female politicians' clothing. Nobody analyzes what Barbara Boxer wears to a hearing, or Olympia Snowe, even though they are both perfectly attractive. I think the place we are at now is that, for women, people say attractive when they mean charismatic. In Jane Mayer's piece, you can see the men around Palin struggling to come up with the right words to describe this awestruck feeling they have. They settle on demeaning ones—"pretty," "knockout"—but what they are describing is some kind of force she has that they can't quite put into words. This same phenomenon happened to Segolene Royal, the French Socialist candidate. People talked about her bikinis, and her flirty little skirts, but they were really talking about something else.
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That's what she seems to be saying in this interview with People magazine. When asked whether her 17-year-old daughter's pregnancy has changed how she talks about sex with her other kids, she says: "I've always been a proponent of making sure kids understand—even in schools—they'd better take preventative measures so that they don't find themselves in these less than ideal circumstances. Perhaps Bristol could be a good example to other young women that life happens and preventative measures are, first and foremost, the option that should be considered.'' Which does not sound like abstinence only—and does sound completely sensible. I was also kind of surprised by the New Age Sarah who comes through in the interview when she describes Bristol as "kind of an old soul.'' So many layers, and only 12 days. ...
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To answer Meghan’s question, according to Brooks Brothers online, you can get a very nice suit for less than $1,000. And you can get its top-of-the-line suit for around $1,600. A nice shirt and tie might bring this to $2,000. I seriously doubt Joe Biden bought 70 such suits after becoming Obama’s running mate. And whatever happened to the fine political tradition of wearing jeans and a flannel shirt when courting Joe Sixpack? I’m not sure Chanel is (or should be) the female equivalent.
I also find the argument that Palin had nothing else to wear, prior to the RNC’s shopping spree, a little unbelievable. Palin is the governor of a major state. She campaigned for this office, appeared on TV countless times in that election (including in multiple debates), has surely attended governors’ conferences and other formal events in an official capacity. Are we to believe that prior to being tapped for VP, she never owned anything besides a seal-skin coat and 'coon cap?
As a native of Dallas, I’ve spent my fair share of money at Neiman-Marcus’ flagship store, but as Slate’s piece points out today—it’s pretty hard to blow $150,000, even at a store like Neiman’s. Moreover, I know a lot of high-society women in Dallas who brag about the fine fashion they’ve also found at Target, especially in these tough economic times. (They call the store “Tar-chez.”) Is it really the opinion of the women on XX Factor that a woman can’t look good on TV or at a rally in anything less than a $4,000 designer suit? Seems to me we’re buying into Carrie Bradshaw’s world view a little too much. The dress Michelle Obama wore when she went on The View famously cost $148 off the rack.
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I swore off Sarah Palin for the week, but I can't resist a comment about her wardrobe—and a few questions for all you smart ladies. First, I find it telling that many outlets (including Slate and our blog) continue to refer to the shopping spree as "Sarah Palin's" shopping spree and talk about what "she's" done, when we know that Republican handlers bought the clothes and arranged for the wardrobe. But how active was she in this whole thing? Was she more or less outfitted than Biden was? Would we use the same kind of language of implication if we found out that Democrats had selected for Joe Biden a wardrobe costing $150,000? Or would we assume more distance between the candidate and his clothes? Would the party EVER spend that much money on a man?
These questions seem important because how we think about women and their clothes is different from how we think about a man and his clothes. Clothes are one of the many ways it's more complicated to be a woman politician than a man; women have to spend more time coming up with a look than men do. Historically, men have had a uniform that connotes authority, and women haven't. Most female uniforms have signified subservience: I'm a helper. Think nurses, stewardesses, etc. By contrast, many male uniforms have signaled power: I'm a protector/decider. Think doctors, cops, businessmen in power suits. (Of course there is also a subset of lower-status male uniforms.)
One imagines Palin isn't that active a participant in her makeover. But she is being dressed up and positioned to look her best. As someone pointed out to me today, in the VP debate moderated by Gwen Ifill there were several shots of Palin and Biden from behind, showing off Palin's shoes, her nice legs, and other, er, assets. And whether or not she chooses any of this, she's implicated in it—setting off these sorts of conversations. It's analogous to many of the problems Hillary faced, and it says to me, at least, that we still have a long way to go before we really get used to women in politics.
Finally, if we're gonna talk about these things: How much does Biden's wardrobe cost, do you think? All you men who read XXFactor: some of you must have a sense of how much this snazzy-looking suit (which he wore during one of the VP debates) cost. I'm at meghanor@gmail.com if anyone has an educated guess...
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So, Barack Obama has raised $605 million (including money from sources whose "names" look as if they were plucked from ACORN's voter registrations lists), reneged on his pledge to take matching federal funds along with John McCain, and is spending almost $2 million on a half-hour ad to air on the networks next Sunday, and I'm supposed to think he's a man of the people because he gets his shoes resoled? Sorry, I'm not buying it.
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Susannah, the hole in the shoe is a well-trod candidate cliché. Obama probably doesn't want to go the way of a previous presidential candidate from Illinois whose hole-filled soles became a campaign symbol: Adlai Stevenson (this Wikipedia entry even has a picture of a Stevenson statue that shows off the shoes). Both Barack and Michelle Obama are beautifully dressed and have great personal style, which is to be appreciated. I'm with the previous XXers who don't begrudge Palin her shopping spree. That she didn't have a wardrobe ready for a vice-presidential run was at least an easily fixable deficiency.
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In regards to Sarah Palin's $150,000 shopping spree, it's not so much the clothes, but what the clothes say about the soul of the one who wears them. In stark contrast to Palin's high-end high heels and perfectly tailored lady suits, Barack Obama gets his hard-worn campaign trail shoes resoled. This telling photo says more about Obama's interior than any trip to Saks could ever reveal of Palin, who's little more than a prop for a political party that's flailing. The Obama photo is part of a terrific series of intimate shots taken by Time photographer Callie Shell, but for a full breakdown of Palin's shopping obscenity, this graphic really says it all.
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How disappointing for Sarah Palin that she won’t get to keep any of those designer jackets, flattering pencil skirts, or peep-toe shoes. She would have known all along that the duds weren’t hers to keep—they are just part of the contrivance and makeup for her role in So You Think You Can Run for Vice President. The $150,000 was a production expense and when the season ends, she’ll have to return hers and the family’s costumes (Levi’s too?). She must be thinking, though, even if she and her dancing partner lose, she sorta earned the clothes. She’s responsible for raising so much money and all. Plus, they look really, really, good on her. Whoever gets that shantung silk Valentino jacket secondhand, will not do it justice the way Sarah did in her convention speech. Of course, sadly, keeping them would be against the law. (I doubt she could argue that they remain on permanent “loan” like Sen. Stevens’ massage chair.) Maybe she could suggest the campaign donate them to her favorite charity, the Salvation Army in Wasilla. She could buy them all back for pennies on the dollar.
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Noreen, I'll back you up a bit. If I had $150,000 to spend, I think I'd run right out to Escada. Or Prada. Or any other -ada where you could get such gorgeous garments. But—and this goes for any Democrats espousing the same message (Nancy and her Armani, etc.)—I'm not the one shouting an "I'm just regular folk, not elite" message. And if I had that $150,000 to spend on clothes—whether through a national political committee or my own wealth—I don't think I could rightly claim status as just a regular Jane anymore. Once you start paying $5,000 for your makeup, you join the ranks of some elite, whether it's media or not, don't you? I'm not saying, as Ellen astutely pointed out, that she doesn't need clothes that look good for this job interview—she does (though I think there's probably some suits out there that could be beautifully tailored for some savings and still make her look like a million bucks). I'm just saying it doesn't fit well with the us-against-those-darn-elites message that's been the centerpiece of her campaign.
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OK, I'm not saying that if the powers-that-be at Slate told me I had to purchase $150,000 worth of clothes for my job I wouldn't love every second of spending it. (And sure, maybe it's a more appropriate spree for someone who spends her day in front of television cameras rather than a computer screen.) And Ellen, you're totally right that she's only "complicit in the big machine that this is all a part of." But I guess if I were really big on cutting all the wasteful spending at Slate, and really shaking up the old way of doing things around here with all my maverick stances, I might think about saying thanks but no thanks to the check.
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This is the very last thing I'm gonna say about Palin's down-parka-to-Escada makeover when I'm supposed to be doing real work, but can I get a show of hands from everybody who thinks looking good is a problem? Me neither; this jacket in particular I could really go for. Only weeks ago, fresh off the news that my 401(k) was histoire, I made quite a frivolous clothing purchase in euros, for heaven's sake; even the Parisian salesdude couldn't believe it. And as someone who in my first year out of grad school spent a cool third of her annual income on an Yves Saint Laurent cocktail dress I wore twice, I have no rocks to throw on this one and am with June in SP's corner.
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Like June, I can't believe I'm saying this, but should we really be attacking Palin for spending $150,000 on clothes? Seems to me that we should reserve judgment until Hillary Clinton and other female politicians put a price tag on their wardrobes. (Nancy Pelosi, by the way, favors Armani.) It's fine to bemoan lavish spending in principle, but hardly fair to put a spotlight on Palin till we know for sure that her behavior is unusual.
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Noreen,
I'm with June. I don't think it's fair either to pick on Palin because of her wardrobe. (C'mon, isn't there so much more to pick on?) You dress up to go to a job interview. Campaigning for the vice presidency is a very long job interview on a much bigger playing field. There's no reason I couldn't do my job in pajamas or sweatpants, but we have a code about what we wear to the office and in public. And if you were interviewing applicants for a job, you would not pick the one in sweatpants. It's an unfortunate side effect of our visual, 24-hour celebrity culture that you have to look gorgeous all the time now if you are in the public eye. And I don't blame Palin. This is not her doing. She is only complicit in the big machine that this is all a part of. But if you are going to play the game, you have to wear the uniform.
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June, totally fair. Why does a vice president need a wardrobe that's extraordinary? Clothes don't affect on-the-job performance, and as long as she doesn't look like a slob, it doesn't affect public diplomacy. We don't expect, say, beauty contestants to give answers in the interview portion that are much more than serviceable. ...Wardrobe is to the presidency as interviewing is to pageants--sure, it affects what you think of the candidate, but it's not really what you're picking your pony on in either instance.
I'm not saying there's anything wrong with being a politician and a clotheshorse--in fact, I kinda dig it. (I'm looking at you, Nancy!) But it's not been a lifelong interest of Palin's, and unlike other things she hasn't shown an interest in, this one has virtually no bearing on the substance of the job she wants to do. Sprucing up your look--helpful in a campaign, of course--can be done on the cheap.
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A few weeks ago, when it was pointed out that it wasn't all that surprising that someone like Palin (Alaska resident, married young, parent of five) wouldn't have a passport or extensive foreign travel experience, the response was: Yeah, but she's running for vice president. An extraordinary job with extraordinary demands. (I am persuaded by this argument.)
Now that the question is about her wardrobe, we're back to asking her to be normal.
No fair!
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What I find interesting about the whole Palin sex-pot debate is that her supposed sex appeal hasn't translated into more votes--even in previously die-hard red states, such as Colorado, where dudes are plentiful, and ammo girls are to be admired. For all the hoopla surrounding her nomination, Palin's appeal is as inflated as Susannah's blow-up doll. In fact, she has turned out to be a significant drag on the McCain ticket. According to the recent NBC/Wall Street Journal Poll, her perceived lack of qualifications is the number one concern voters have about voting for McCain--even above their fears about the economy or that McCain will continue Bush's policies. Turns out flawless make-up, a $150,000 wardrobe and all those winks haven't actually resulted in a lasting boost for McCain. I don't think this is sexism; I think Palin is being judged on her merits. After all, Republicans as diverse as Kathleen Parker, Christopher Buckley and Colin Powell have argued that Palin is simply not ready to be President, which is the top job of Vice President.
By contrast, Gloria Steinem's looks complemented her substance. In her day, she likely needed the former to sell the latter. I certainly don't begrudge Steinem her beauty. A smart, sexy woman shouldn't be penalized for her looks. But in the case of Palin, we are supposed to accept her sex appeal in lieu of her qualifications. This pitch hasn't worked, which I think also helps explain everyone's sudden, belated appreciation of Hillary. Six months ago, Hillary was seen as a scold, even by many in her own party. Now, the pantsuits, the unbecoming hair, the lack of a beguiling voice and feminine wiles have never seemed more attractive. People are falling all over themselves to praise her--including Palin! (Who'd have thunk a Clinton would be embraced by the Republican party?) Hillary has set the bar very high for any woman who wants to follow in her footsteps. Indeed, Palin has been surrounded by middle-aged women at the top of their games--Katie Couric, Tina Fey and the newly arrived Rachel Maddow. The contrast has not been pretty.
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OK, I have to say this, though I'm guessing it will not make me XXer of the day or anything. (Ergh, that sounds like something John McCain would say, bragging for the 9 millionth time about not being named Miss Congeniality.) Anyway, though I happen to think the whole ‘Bama pals with terrorists' line is toxic as well as so misshapen as to qualify as an outright lie, I would not characterize what Michelle Bachmann said on "Hardball' as a rant; in all fairness, Chris Matthews saw his opening and maneuvered her into it. He took what she did say - "Most Americans, Chris, are wild about America'' - I think she means you, Dana - "and they're very concerned to have a president who doesn't share those values.'' And then, he successfully pushed her to take that to its logical conclusion, that being critical of anything America does ever is the same as having anti-American views. That is an argument I disagree with, and one side of a conversation that's been going on at least since Vietnam. But it is still a mischaracterization to react as though she went on screaming that the FBI should forget Bin Laden and look into Nancy Pelosi. (What bothered me more was her assertion that, "It was Michelle Obama who said she's only recently proud of her country.'' No, she didn't.)
If negative campaigning really had finally found its floor, in any case, that would be the best thing since Caller ID. And whatever her motivations, I'm glad Sarah Palin has apologized for her comments dividing us into the "real America'' of small towns like the ones she and I grew up in and...not so real America, like New York and Washington, where lots of us small town natives wind up. As Jon Stewart said the other night, Bin Laden must feel like a real *&F@# after having realized he bombed the wrong America. Not to mention those from-the-wrong America firefighters who ran into the Twin Towers; gosh are they embarrassed.
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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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Susannah, you remind of the good old days. Meaning the early '90s, when the Independent Women's Forum was just getting started, and they would celebrate every minor anniversary at a local shooting range. Only they were city girls for the most part, or aspiring city girls. So Ann Coulter would gamely trek out to the range in her size 0 jodhpurs, and Laura Ingraham in her tight skirts, and they would aim but the birdies would all just go plopping down.
Although, to keep with our theme of yesterday, Sarah Palin owns this one, too.
As for the high clothing bill. Come on, girls. You are suddenly picked to be the VP candidate. You have to do about a million public appearances a week. You need to wear something, and so does your large family. It doesn't seem excessive to me. It's like the average clothing allowance of a Conde Nast editor, who mostly just goes to the office.
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Thanks, Dahlia, for throwing down the welcome mat. Although, I'd add that part of what I was trying to point out in my post about the Palin sex doll is that it's not just the male population—your "dirty old men"—that are obsessed with Palin's sexuality—it's women, too. And Hanna, I loved this: "Maybe Sarah Palin is the first one to own the sex appeal and use it as her weapon." Speaking of weapons ...
Last week, a Fox news outlet in Colorado wondered if Palin's gun-lovin' 'tude would inspire other ladies to take up the hunt. The number of U.S. hunters is on the decline, but Palin could become a "role model" for those who like to kill their dinner. The billion-dollar hunting industry has taken up targeting women, including marketing pink firearms.
Intrigued, I found a few girlie guns online. Crickett makes three different models of single-shot, .22-caliber pink rifles. Remington makes a pink-barreled shotgun that reads: "Shoot like a girl ... if you can!" And Taurus manufactures a 9 mm semi-automatic pink pistol.
Let's hope the inflatable Palin love doll doesn't get taken out in the crossfire.
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John Edwards' $400 haircut mattered because it added to the impression that he was a pretty boy. Sarah Palin's $150,000 wardrobe makeover, paid for by the Republican National Committee at the cash registers of Saks, Neiman Marcus, and Barneys, matters for a kind of opposite reason: It explodes the idea that she's a middle-class woman of the people. In a sense, this is unfair. If Palin was wealthy, she'd have had the leather boots and tailored suits already. And if her look is hugely important to the McCain campaign, or at least to the crowds she draws, why shouldn't the RNC pay for it? Isn't her image a legitimate campaign expense?
Two reasons why this doesn't fly, I think. The first is that the price tag is just too high, too many teacher and nurse and firefighter salaries. The second is that all this money spent on clothes, etc., points out exactly how much Palin is trading on her sexuality, her winks, her look. You're right, Hanna and Susannah, she's owning her sex appeal. All $150,000 of it.
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Until now the McCain/Palin team has let the media spin about her appeal to women, and how he chose her to steal some of the Hillary thunder. But in these last desperate days of the campaign, they have decided to leave nothing to inference. For those too dense to pick up the hints, Palin has decided to actually plagiarize Hillary. "Are you willing to break the highest, hardest glass ceiling in America," she told a crowd yesterday in Henderson, Nevada, according to the Washington Post. She then went on to accuse the Obama campaign of paying women on its staff 83 cents for every dollar that men get. Now that is some serious chutzpah. I mean, is there no female archetype this woman is unwilling to inhabit: ballbuster, moose hunter, mom, good Christian, sexpot and now rope sandal feminist.
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Susannah, what a great connection. The First Feminists have been such sourpusses during this election that I'd forgotten about their sexed-up side: Gloria Steinem, zipless Erica Jong, Germaine Greer busting out of her tight grey suits, flanked by two women making out behind her. On the conservative side, the anti-feminists have been flirting with sexiness for a while, basically since Laura Ingraham posed for the New York Times Magazine in her leopard-print miniskirt. But it's always been a little timid, as if they were just a younger version of the good, Republican wife. Maybe Sarah Palin is the first one to own the sex appeal and use it as her weapon. Everytime you read about the crowds of men around her, they seem much less predator than prey, just awed, awed by her, here in the New York Times and in the Jane Mayer piece.
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Susannah, thanks for the great posts and welcome! Please forgive me if I suggest this Flight of the Conchords song as background music for this post, just because reading your post about the Sarah Palin blow-up doll made me think of their genius lyric: “She's so hot, she's making me sexist.”
Susannah’s post taken together with Bonnie’s raise the depressing specter of an America that's run largely by dirty old men or, perhaps, by men who simply cannot untangle their sexual feelings about women from their political ones. Yuck. I don’t know about the rest of you, but if the lesson of the two posts together is that men are from Porky’s and our only choice is whether or not to exploit that, I think there’s still time to get me to a nunnery by sundown.
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So a little over a month ago in this space, a few of us wished Rachel Maddow luck with her new MSNBC nightly talk show. And boy, has she had luck, or made her own. Today’s NYT reports that in the 25 days her show has been on the air, it’s doubled viewership in that 9 p.m. time slot. She’s keeping 90 percent of Keith Olbermann’s audience from the previous slot—and he has the second-biggest audience in cable news.
Speaking for myself, I can say that in the few weeks it’s been on the air, Maddow’s show has quietly become a staple of my unwholesomely large media diet. I put my kid to bed, make dinner, and watch Rachel Maddow (or at least have her on in the background while surfing the Web for more political news. Like an addict knowing I’ll be forced into rehab come Nov. 4, I’ve just given in at this point.) Her show still has some kinks to work out. It’s too indebted to airheaded cable-news conventions like the spin-doctor interview (who cares what paid campaign flacks have to say on either side?) and the dreaded celebrity-gossip “expert” (both Olbermann and Matthews regularly host these types, and both visibly recoil from them. Just kill the segment!). But as Maddow settles in, she’s quickly evolving into the liveliest voice of the left-leaning media, as well as the only major cable-news host who doesn't seem constantly on the brink of an apoplectic fit.
I think I’m not alone in Maddow love. Profiles of her are appearing everywhere, like this interview with GQ, in which she cheerfully identifies herself as “a big lesbian who looks like a man,” and this "Domains" piece from the last NYT Sunday magazine. I usually hate “Domains”—a weekly feature about the living space of a famous person that seems designed to incite lifestyle envy among readers—but I genuinely wanted to pull a chair up to Maddow’s kitchen table in Northampton, Mass., right next to the reflector-holding garden squirrel, and have old-school mixed drinks with her and her girlfriend. And mind you, I’m straight (though seeing RM in her cute civilian duds on The Tonight Show, I sort of wonder why …).
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A new message to Sarah Palin popped up on YouTube this weekend. The video features young girls begging that she not "undo everything they (the girls' feminist mothers and grandmothers) fought for." What stood out to me was the statistic that "women in Alaska get raped over twice as much as women in the rest of the country." It's true.
Alaska has struggled with a high rape rate for years, especially among its rural population. According to an FBI report in 2007, the rate was 77.4 per 100,000 people, which is 2.58 times higher than the national rate of 30 per 100,000.
The video also claims Palin has done nothing to reduce the high rate of rape and doesn't care about violence against girls and women. It's worth noting that the problem existed long before she made the jump from hockey mom to political figure. But is there anything to the criticism?
Last year, Amnesty International blamed the federal government, along with state government, for the high sexual assault rates among Alaska Native women. At the state level, the report cites the difficulty state troopers, a group of 240 commissioned troopers, have patrolling the large state. Responding to a call can take hours, or even days, the report found. In 2005, troopers received a call from a village 150 miles away in which a man had beat his wife with a shotgun and barricaded himself in the house with four children. Troopers arrived more than four hours later and after the man had raped a 13-year-old Alaska Native girl.
Palin controls the state troopers' budget. There's no guarantee that merely giving them more money would improve the situation—though it might. Or maybe the solution is more complicated, but one the governor's office should look for.
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Anne, thanks for sending me to Jane Mayer's New Yorker essay "The Insiders." My lasting image from the piece is one of Gov. Palin hijacking two boatloads of conservative pundits and charming them with her wiles. This is the quick study Sarah Barracuda whom Alaskans know and love.
In June 2007, a shipful of opinion makers on a Weekly Standard cruise docked for a day in Juneau. In office only six months, Palin invited William Kristol, Fred Barnes, and Michael Gerson along with their families to a "high spirited" lunch at the governor's mansion. Mayer reports, "everyone was charmed when the Governor's small daughter Piper popped in." After lunch, Palin took her guests for a quick hop (by air) to visit a genuine Alaska gold mine. Ore was not the only thing twinkling. Gerson's impression of the hostess was "a mix between Annie Oakley and Joan of Arc." A "dazzled" Barnes told Mayer he found his new acquaintance "exceptionally pretty" and returned home to write her first national profile "The Most Popular Governor." Later, a besotted Kristol, who spoke of her on-air as "my heartthrob," ardently positioned her for the VP pick.
Weeks after the successful party, the new-as-snow governor intercepted another luxury fundraising tour, sponsored by the National Review. Palin threw a "special reception" at the mansion for the cruise's powerful "guest speakers" (check out this year's lineup here). The perhaps slightly bored pundits (magazine publisher Jack Fowler recalls, "There's only so much you can do in Juneau") happily attended the party and were equally impressed with their host. Fowler: "This lady is something special. She connects. She's genuine. She doesn't look like what you'd expect." Another NR editor later described the governor as "a former beauty-pageant contestant, and a real honey, too." One guest, historian Victor Davis Hansen, told Mayer he "was delighted that Palin described herself as a fan of history, and as a reader of National Review's Web site, for which he writes regularly." The novice governor and notorious horn dog Dick Morris also made a "meaningful connection." The strategist, who once advised a previous ambitious governor, told Palin to hang onto her "outsider cred."
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Today, I received my Sarah Palin inflatable love doll in the mail. I'd heard about the "This Is Not Sarah Palin Inflatable Love Doll" a few weeks ago, and when Topco Sales marketing director Desiree Duffie offered to send me one, who was I to say no? This morning, I missed the FedEx delivery; thankfully, he left the box behind a potted plant. In my apartment, I removed the product from the packaging. From the cover, a busty brunette with an updo, wearing glasses and a blue business suit with the front falling open, stared back at me. "Cross party lines with your own inflatable running mate!" the copy read. On the back, a list of key points informed: "She makes sexism sexy." When I removed the deflated doll, I found the inflatable Palin doesn't look much like the real one. And it takes forever to inflate. But one question remained: Why is America so sexually obsessed with Sarah Palin?
From male fanatics to Alec Baldwin's come-on, an adult video spoof to Palin-inspired erotica, the ways in which the public sexualizes the Republican vice presidential candidate are never-ending. Some blame her for sexualizing herself -- her look is nothing if not sexy librarian goes to Washington -- while others blame misogyny; Feministing is conducting a "Palin Sexism Watch" and has declared the Palin love doll: "So disgusting." But is it? These days, this blog and its sister sites in the blogosphere are as obsessed with Palin as a man would have to be to order an inflatable version of her. Because of the complicated message the so-called VIPILF sends out, politics and sex -- and sexual politics -- are at the fore like never before, and for the first time in a long time, the debate isn't about male sexuality (Spitzer, Clinton, Vitter), it's about female sexuality.
You know who Sarah Palin reminds me of? Gloria Steinem, back in the day, when she was a polarizing figure who captivated the public. Steinem's rhetoric was hardcore feminist, but she was a sexual lightning rod in much the same way Palin is. Watching Palin Slick Willie her way through her appearance on "Saturday Night Live" last weekend, I couldn't help but recall Steinem's "I Was a Playboy Bunny" gonzo journalism story, in which the feminist leader-to-be went undercover as a Playboy bunny at the New York Playboy Club. Without a doubt, the agendas of Steinem and Palin couldn't be more different, but there's something about the way they walk the line when it comes to female sexuality that seems deeply similar to me. They're both as aware of their sexuality as they are dead-set on focusing on politics over sex, but how can we be surprised when Americans respond in kind and sexualize the images of those women whose sexual complexities sit center stage in American politics?
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Ann, thank you for bringing up my Atlantic story on transgender children. When I was reporting, I felt the opposite: Culture weighed very heavily on the boys and not so much on the girls. A girl could go a long time in gym shorts and cropped hair before anyone thought she was anything but a tomboy. But a boy in a ponytail and a skirt? Totally unacceptable. The girls I talked to generally never showed up at a psychologist's office until about age 8 or 9, which is when their love of toy guns and spy gear suddenly seemed conspicuous and when puberty was looming. Boys showed up at age 4, with parents already worried that their sons played with Barbies or dressed up in tutus.
In this little slice of the world, feminists of the Hillary generation can look back and see what they have to be grateful for. In the simplistic, Free To Be You and Me view of gender relations, girls have come a long way. They can be doctors or bus drivers and they no longer do housework alone. But the boys seem stuck in a narrow retro space. William and his doll still raise a big red flag.
That said, maybe there is a stronger biological imperative for boys, as you say, because boys pay such a high price for wearing that skirt that something unstoppable must be driving them to put it on.
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In the new Atlantic, Hanna has a fascinating, and unsettling, piece on transgender children, in which she examines how the issue is being reconceived by experts and parents. Following her through the maze of biology vs. culture, I found myself wondering what light, if any, history might shed on the debate. Girls spending at least part of their childhoods imagining, or wishing, they were boys seems a familiar—and culturally very explicable—drama. Greater freedom, more leeway for ambition and assertiveness, a sense of separateness from omnipresent mom: Certainly back in the day—and now, too—it's easy to see why energetic girls have seen advantages in being a boy—until the hormones kick in and other urges complicate the picture. I'm intrigued to know whether there is any data to suggest a more recent rise in boys wishing they were girls. If so, could that suggest anything about wider cultural, as well as family, influences—or does it perhaps point to possible gender differences in the transgender phenomenon? Could it be, say, that culture plays more of a role in "gender dysphoria," as it's called, among girls, and biology among boys?
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So, news outlets reported that yesterday Joe Biden told fundraisers in Seattle that in the next six months an international crisis would "test" Barack Obama just as one had tested Kennedy. According to reports, Biden told supporters: "The world is looking. We're about to elect a brilliant 47-year-old senator president of the United States. Watch, we're going to have an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test the mettle of this guy." The gist in part seems to be that Obama is as brilliant as Kennedy. But one wonders why, exactly, Biden felt he had to say this now, since it opened Obama up to an easy counterattack, which McCain promptly seized. At a rally this afternoon, he asked crowds why they'd want to elect a president whose mettle the world feels primed to test--i.e., a president who has so little experience he seems an easy target, or at least an urgent target.
Meanwhile, according to CNN, McCain has been closing ground in one poll, which asked voters who they supported for president, leaving Obama with a five-point lead compared to the eight-point one he had at the beginning of the month. These polls are changing all the time. But maybe not a good time for Biden to be acting as if Obama has the race locked up.
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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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Every woman should read New York Times reporter Jeffrey Gettleman's latest missive on the rape-as-war-tactic epidemic in Congo: "Rape Victims' Words Help Congo Into Change." A year ago, Gettleman exposed the horrors happening in Bukavu, Congo, where thousands of women were being brutally raped as a consequence of the country's ongoing internal strife. In 2006, according to the UN, some 26,000 women were victims of sexual assaults in South Kivu Province alone. As a Congolese gynecologist stated, the savage attacks, which sometimes involve bayonets and piece of wood, resulting in the destruction of victims' reproductive and digestive systems, are "done to destroy women."
Since, the UN has declared such grand scale acts of sexual violence "a tactic of war." Now, Gettleman returns with another report from the frontlines. "Congo, it seems, is finally facing its horrific rape problem," he writes, "which United Nations officials have called the worst sexual violence in the world." Today, due to international attention, outside aid, and local efforts, a "culture of impunity" is breaking down, ending the silence when it comes to rape. More arrests of perpetrators are taking place than ever before, but, Gettleman is quick to point out, the number of those charged remains relatively small, particularly in a culture "where women tend to be beaten down anyway."
In makeshift forums, women are telling their stories. "'There was no dinner,'" one woman's tale begins. "It was me who was dinner." In the audience, several women wore T-shirts that read in Kiswahili: "I refuse to be raped. What about you?" Eve Ensler, best known for having written "The Vagina Monolgues," is seeking to put an end to the worst rape problem in the world. Ensler deems the phenomenon "femicide": "'I have spent the past 10 years of my life in the rape mines of the world,' she said. 'But I have never seen anything like this.'" The playwright is helping to open a center at the heart of the problem that will provide counseling and support to thousands of rape victims. If you want to learn more, you can read about the project or donate here.
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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.
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Apparently, it is a big darn deal that Colin Powell might, just possibly, sorta orta endorse Obama tomorrow on "Meet the Press.'' To which I say: Whoop-dee-damn-do. Who cares what Powell, the "loyal soldier'' - if by loyal you mean willing to betray the American people - thinks? It was on his no-good word that a lot of people believed we had an other-than trumped up reason to go into Iraq, when Powell by his own (much later) admission knew all along that we did not. The way I read Bob Woodward's Plan of Attack, Powell was so flattered to have been asked to make the case for war at the U.N. that he was willing to put tens of thousands of lives at risk by buffing up the cherry-picked intelligence, and presenting it with a flourish. So my questions are: Why does he continue to get the Great Man treatment from the press? Whose vote could he possibly sway? This piece makes it look like he's giving Obama foreign policy advice, which I hope is not the case. (Remember Somalia?) I know that I've argued endlessly that Democrats oughtn't disparage a single voter anywhere ever, but as Emily Y. points out in her excellent piece on the evolution of umbrage, hyper-rationality is not only overrated, but is in fact a hallmark of brain damage! So for you, General, I make an exception: Keep your old semi-endorsement. (I am not Barack Obama, and he did not approve this message.)
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Watch the amazing video of John McCain and Barack Obama at tonight’s Alfred E Smith Memorial Dinner in New York. It’s not just that both of them are wreck-yer-mascara funny. They are. And it’s not just that they let themselves laugh out loud at each other’s jokes. They do. The really stunning part is getting to see them both again the way they were back when we loved and adored them: two men in full, completely inhabiting their quirky, funny, inspirational selves. Watching them makes you wonder who these freaky spectral candidates are—the boring squashed-up versions of Obama and McCain we've endured through the end of last night’s debate. It makes you wonder what it is about presidential politics in 2008 that sucks out what’s best in our candidates and leaves us with a distillate of small, safe, hard, angry little men.
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Rosa,
I'm glad we can agree on something! I, too, feel sorry for Joe. The way the media has responded to him today has been appalling. For a time, the lead story on NYTimes.com was "Joe the Plumber is under scrutiny, " even highlighting ominously that "his full name is Samuel J. Wurzelbacher." It's not exactly uncommon for people to go by their middle names. MSNBC.com's lead story right now digs into Wurzelbacher's background (even citing his DIVORCE RECORDS), saying that the plumber he works for might be fined because Joe doesn't have proper licensing. And, horrors, the business might take in only $100,000, not $250,000, and that's revenue, not profits. But who knows? Earlier media reports I've seen have been riddled with errors, saying that Joe already owns the business or runs the business, or that Wurzelbacher said he wouldn't be able to BUY the business if Obama's tax plan kicked in. I might have misheard Wurzelbacher in the original video, but I don't remember him saying that.
Forgive me for sounding like a knee-jerk reactionary, but how can people look at the scrutiny Wurzelbacher has received in the last 24 hours and not think there is some kind of bias at play? John McCain cites a regular old American in his debate-something that can annoy me when it's a sob story about how the government has failed someone—and people cheer for the guy, identify with the guy, and so he has to be taken down? Obama has a pretty comfortable lead in the polls right now. He can't possibly be afraid of Joe the Plumber. I don't get the media feeding frenzy.
I might feel bad for Joe, but I'm not worried about him. (And I think you might be disappointed if you expect him to blame the attention on McCain.) He's got a good perspective on it all. "I'll have my 15 minutes," he told MSNBC. After Nov. 4, "I won't be recognized again, and that'll be fine with me." I just wish the media had the same good common sense.
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I take back what I said about his bright future even as a Fox News star.
Joe is a faux plumber! (Quel horreur!) And a tax scofflaw! And something about Obama just happens to remind him of Sammy Davis Jr.! And-- if true, this next thing is weirder than weird—Joe may be related by marriage to Charles Keating, star of the S &L scandal that almost ended McCain's Senate career! And—his name's not even Joe!
By now I am starting to feel kind of sorry for Joe. Faux Joe. Samuel. Whatever his name is. He registered as a Republican last spring. By now, he's probably having second thoughts about how great it is to be championed by John McCain before a viewing audience of 38 million U.S. households.
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I'm still not worried about Joe the Plumber. For one thing, the guy's now the most famous plumber in America, and I'd say he's got a future as a Fox News star.
But for another, Emily, he's fine either way: If he buys this company and it doesn't make enough to push his personal income over $250,000, then he gets no Obama tax increase, and depending on his income level, he very likely gets one of those Obama tax cuts. Lucky fella. And if his company's profits do push him over $250,000 (I can't find the link, but I believe that in an interview he says they probably would), then his marginal tax rate would go up a tad under Obama's plan, but he's still making far, far more than most of his fellow Americans—and keeping most of it, too.
So what's the problem here for Joe? He'd rather not have his marginal tax rate increase. OK, I get that. But no one—certainly not Obama—is suggesting he didn't work hard to get his money, or that he's not "entitled to keep most of it." We're talking about a small increase in the marginal tax rate for Americans in the top fifth percentile of incomes, not about nationalizing Joe's plumbing business. (Much as I'd like free government-provided plumbing ...)
I guess I just don't see why Obama's comment about wanting to "spread the wealth around" strikes fear into anyone's heart. That's what the progressive income tax is supposed to do—and no one really questions the core concept, just the details (What should the highest marginal tax rate be? What should the income threshold be? etc.). Right now, given the stunning levels of income inequality in this country, both parties agree that we need to spread the weath around a bit. The question is just what mechanism will most effectively do the trick. Is it improving education while cutting taxes for all, as McCain proposes?Or is it tax cuts for the lower 95 percent and marginal tax rate increases for the wealthiest 5 percent, including, hypothetically, Joe the Plumber—if he hits the big time?
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I must admit that I struggled hard about whether to watch the Project Runway finale or the debate last night, and in the end toggled back and forth. For our more high minded readers who resisted, I will here break the news to you that the winner was Leanne Marshall, a lovely and somewhat boring girl from Seattle. The loser was Kenley, the daughter of a tugboat captain with the haughtiness of a Park Avenue brat. I have no real problem with the outcome. All three finalists presented nice, cohesive collections, and any could have won.
But here is my issue. Michael Kors presented this as the "women's final," because this was the first time all three who made it to Bryant Park were women. So I will judge it on those terms. Throughout the season, and especially at the end, Kenley was treated as reality show fodder, the contestant you string along until the end because she is so entertaining, not because she is talented. She was bitchy, rude, disrespectful, even to the ever-gentle Tim Gunn. And then, although she presented the most spirited collection, she was pushed aside for the meek one.
In the last two seasons, the exact opposite happened. Christian, who won last season, was an arrogant snot, which only won him deference and respect from the judges. Jeffrey Sebelia, the ex-addict with the neck tattoos, was an asshole of Eminem caliber. In his case, too, arrogance was conflated with confidence was conflated with talent. But not so for Kenley. If she had been "sassy" or "vivacious" or full of "moxie," maybe. But no amount of talent can rescue a young woman who is an outright bitch.
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McCain scored some shots tonight. He made a strong point about Obama's wanting to "spread the wealth around" from Joe the Plumber, and I was surprised Obama didn't seem prepared for that. (And Rosa and Juliet, Joe said the business "makes" about $250,000 a year—we don't know if that's gross or net income, so we have no idea what his personal income would be. But in any case, I'm with Rachael in believing Joe's entitled keep most of it.) McCain was much better on the need to support the free-trade agreement with Colombia, which has been a strong U.S. ally. Obama's answer was weak and weasely. But none of this really makes any difference, because when you watch McCain for an extended period, there is something off about him. His angry facial tics, his strange shorthand, inside-Washington way of talking. Half the time, unless you already knew what he was talking about, you'd have no idea what he was talking about. There's a guy at my gym who's always muttering curses under his breath as he does his circuit, and I think of him as "Seething Man." McCain was Seething Man tonight, and Obama was "Reassuring Man," and people want reassurance now more than ever.
Also, what was with Bob Schieffer? For the last hour in particular his questions were all variations of "Senator, would you like education to be better or worse in this country? And please include as much of your stump speech in the answer as possible."
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Color me baffled. In response to a question about Sarah Palin’s qualification to be president, John McCain talked first about her credentials as a reformer and then moved swiftly to explain that Palin “understands special-needs families. She understands that autism is on the rise, that we've got to find out what's causing it, and we've got to reach out to these families and help them, and give them the help they need as they raise these very special-needs children. She understands that better than almost any American that I know. I'm proud of her.” Later on, he added—again regarding autism—that “Sarah Palin knows about that better than most.” Now, we know Palin has a special-needs child: Her infant son, Trig, has Down Syndrome. So it’s fair to suggest that she understands special-needs families and that—even though it’s not clear what she’s ever done or even proposed doing for them—she might one day be an advocate for them. But I can’t figure out why McCain was coupling Palin with autism, rather than Down Syndrome. Yes, his comment started as a testimonial to her concern for those with special needs, but it came off sounding like he just didn’t know that autism and Down Syndrome are very different. A quick Web search reveals that the main connection between Palin and autism appears to be that, like McCain, parents of autistic kids are blogging hopefully that she will have some special sensitivity to their situation. (Also, it seems Palin has an autistic nephew.)
As panders go, I am finding this autism gambit baffling. Did McCain just get confused about the fact that Trig has Down Syndrome? Or was he trying for some kind of broad-brush special-needs appeal, only to end up awkwardly implying that all special-needs families are the same? So much so that you can swap out diagnoses and nobody will notice? That same broad brush was slapping around later when, in discussing abortion, he started sneering about the trickiness of allowing exceptions for the mother's health. No nuance here. Just the bold implication that all health exceptions represent some kind of female trickery. Last time I checked, women thought their health was sort of important. Toss in his eye-crossing claim that anyone who supports abortion rights is, by necessity, not going to be qualified to sit on the Supreme Court, and it was time to kiss women voters goodbye. How can a man who can see all the complexity and subtlety in foreign policy and health care reform talk to and about women and families in terms that persistently read like cave drawings?
McCain really proved tonight that his brand of feminism is frozen in 1960—an artless pander to the mommies tacked onto the claim that he is “proud” of his vice president. It's all reminiscent of the ad men on Mad Men, chivalrous but wrong.
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Can we look at a larger point about Joe the Plumber? Joe Wurzelbacher is, after all, a plumber. He didn't have his well-off parents send him off for his MBA or a law-school degree so he could get a cushy 9-to-5 job with an office and an assistant and good benefits. He's not a 25-year-old starting an Internet company with someone else's venture capital. He's gotten where he is today by unclogging our smelly toilets and fixing the pipes we probably should have had looked at before they burst.
He's been a plumber for 15 years. That's a lot of midnight calls and weekend shifts and probably a lot of years with low pay. If he's a smart small-business owner, and this interview seems to indicate he's not rash, he's going to take a chunk of those profits and expand his company—as he says, he would hire more plumbers, which requires more trucks and more equipment. All of which helps our economy.
Is $250,000 a year a lot of money? Certainly. But businesses with fewer than 20 employees account for over 20 million jobs in this country. That's not a small figure, and it's pretty comforting in a time when we watch unwieldy big businesses with eight-figure CEOs crashing down on a weekly basis. We should want our small businesses to succeed.
When I watch the video that made Joe famous, and I hear Barack Obama's comment that he wants to "spread the wealth around," I get chills down my spine. Joe wants to spread the wealth around, too. And it's his wealth. I trust him with it more than I trust the government. I hope he does get that plumbing business, and I hope he turns it into a $500,000-a-year business. And I won't begrudge him a single penny of it.
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Rosa -
You're so right to point out that we shouldn't feel sorry for "Joe the Plumber's" tax burden—he's about to buy a company and makes more money than most Americans ever will. Tonight's battle for Joe made me think of Swing Vote, the recent movie where the fate of an election hinges on one man: Kevin Costner. It also made me miss, of all people, John Edwards. Sure, he was annoyingly folksy on the campaign trail, but he also regularly made use of an important word that I haven't heard Obama or McCain mention in any of the debates. It begins with P, but it isn't plumber—it's poverty. When Obama and McCain talk about "average Joes," they mean middle-class Joes. At least John Edwards, for all his many sins, realized our problems go deeper, or lower, than the plight of small-business owners.
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Let's stop feeling so sad for poor Joe the Plumber, who just wants his teensy little piece of the American dream. In his original comments to Obama, Joe explained that he was about to buy a company that would make profits of about $270,000 a year. If that profit bumps Joe's own income over $250,000, then he'll be making more money per year than roughly 95 percent of his fellow Americans. In that case, yeah, as Obama explained to him, Joe won't be getting that middle-class tax cut.
Cry me a river. (The guy makes way more than money, I'll bet, than any of us poor XX bloggers. Maybe we can get him to redistribute a little free plumbing over here? Free plumbing for all: That's MY idea of the American dream.)
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According to the Washington Post, McCain got it wrong tonight when he said that, under Obama's health-care plan, Joe the plumber would pay a fine if he didn't provide his employees health insurance, because the Obama plan has an exemption for small businesses. Given that McCain from practically the first sentence trucked in Joe, last name and all, as his carefully planted and lovingly tended Real Guy, isn't this the definition of campaign malpractice? How could his staff have possibly failed to get Joe right? McCain was often strong tonight, on guard and on the offensive. But when he registered open-mouthed surprise as Obama explained why he was wrong about Joe, McCain looked like a man playing Tina Fey playing Sarah Palin asking for a life line. Obama had his weak moments, too, in the reaction shots, like the big smile he cracked while McCain was making serious charges about Bill Ayers and ACORN. Watching them listen sometimes seems more enlightening than listening to them talk.
Read more XX Factor posts about Joe the Plumber.
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Awhile back I wrote that Meghan McCain had learned to negotiate the difficult terrain of being a political daughter by oversharing on surface-level stuff, and keeping quiet on the truly personal. Looks like she hasn't quite stuck to that-on Hannity and Colmes, she revealed a bit more about the grudges she holds as a political daughter. She's mad about the Atlantic cover controversy, saying"I have a problem when it gets dirty and you're doctoring photos." Most striking is what she said about her support for Kerry and Gore, framing it as more of a vote against Bush, who ran a nasty smear campaign against her dad in the South Carolina primaries, than for the Democrats:
MCCAIN: I can be behind my father all day every day.
COLMES: Sure.
MCCAIN: . until the end of time. I just couldn't get behind President Bush. I just couldn't. It's personal.
COLMES: Yes. You couldn't get behind President Bush?
MCCAIN: It's personal. I was 19 at the time.
HANNITY: And it's a primary 2000.
(CROSSTALK)
COLMES: Hold on, let's.
MCCAIN: It had to do with my little sister, and like, you know, you were just saying that the wounds of a political child run really deep. And there are things that I don't know if I'll ever completely get over.
COLMES: Was it because of what happened in 2000 during the campaign?
MCCAIN: Yes.
COLMES: That you two -- what about your dad now? Is he -- looks like he may have.
MCCAIN: No. He's a great forgiver, move on-er. No. Yes.
Her decision to stump for her dad was obviously one made out of love and personal, rather than party, loyalty. And now she's got to stand there and justify her dad's politically expedient apostasy by saying he's a "mover on-er," and she's got to somehow justify to herself that even though she's been deeply hurt by negative campaigning, it's ok that the McCain campaign isn't exactly taking the high road these days. When I wrote about her earlier, I was impressed with the amount of agency I saw her taking-exploiting the publicity system lest it exploit you first isn't exactly a feminist battle cry, but at least it's not passive. Now, all I can think when I read this is "Poor Meghan, she's trapped." But am I getting played like a flute? Now's probably not a bad time to be reminding people that the McCains have been on the receiving end of smears, and Meghan, at her own admission, didn't go in to this thing a political naïf. This wasn't her first interview, and it wasn't the first time she's talked about the way the 2000 election affected her. Should I put back on my armor of cynicism?
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I'm not at all convinced that Obama's lead is safe, and I think that the positive poll numbers of late could result in liberal complacency on Election Day. But what's indisputable is that Obama's apparent advantage, and the Palin pick, are creating fissures in the Republican Party. Whether these fissures lead to a healthy shake-up, or a crack-up, has yet to be seen. Jed Lewison has a list of the "Republicans and conservatives jumping ship, pointing fingers, or otherwise abandoning the McCain campaign." It includes some of the names we've brought up recently, including Heather Mac Donald, Christopher Buckley, and David Frum, plus some others we hadn't noted.
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Melinda,
I'm so glad you posted on Christopher Buckley leaving the National Review. I was saddened to read his column in the Daily Beast saying he'd left. Also, I had just been conjuring up a post in response to your post and Ellen's from earlier today, in our ongoing discussion about intellectualism and what it is and why it's become a smear, and I think the Buckley story fits in. I especially appreciated Ellen for both calling me out on making intellectual a dirty word and for bringing me into the ranks of great thinkers (even though I spend far more time curled up with Sports Illustrated than with The New Yorker).
It was unwise and unfair of me to group intellectuals as a whole in with the condescending elites that bug me so much, and I admit I was probably thinking of someone like the gentleman Melinda worked for, who constantly reminded others of his genius. Haughtiness drives me batty, and so does what I perceive as intolerance. Which brings me back to Christopher Buckley. It's annoying when smarty-pants liberals say, "Why I don't know anyone who would vote for that imbecile George Bush/John McCain," and it's just as annoying when it comes from the opposite direction, when an angry mob takes on an individual who arrived at a different conclusion from them after much thought. (I've seen Rich Lowry's response, and I find it hard to believe that a great magazine like the National Review doesn't have room for both Christopher Buckley and Mark Steyn, who recently earned a huge victory for free speech in Canada.)
What made me especially sad was Buckley's assertion that the Republican Party was more "yurt" than big tent. The rest of you might laugh at me for thinking so, but I have always felt that GOP was a bigger tent than most outsiders gave it credit for. I know more pro-choice Republicans than I do pro-life Democrats. I know Republicans who are Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, and some who are not religious at all. Some of us can't get too worked up about global warming, but that doesn't stop us from recycling and setting the thermostat at 68 in the winter. I've written a lot on this blog about how dismayed I am with our national discourse, about how divisive and bitter some have become. It hurts even more when those within my own party resorts to petty tactics and cruel words against one another.
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Just a quick note: Conservative Heather Mac Donald of the Manhattan Institute, who once said that "unless you think hard about political questions in our culture, you are liberal by default" and that "you have to think your way out of liberalism" has—you guessed it—denounced Palin. "Enough," she wrote in the City Journal yesterday. "Conservatives should stand for excellence and merit, period. Middle-class status is neither a qualification nor a disqualification; the same goes for economic success."
What I draw from this latest anti-Palin diatribe is 1) Palin's effectively holding up a mirror to the Republican Party, and not everyone likes what they see and 2) a multi-party system with micro-parties for Palin-Republicans, fiscal conservatives, Clinton-Democrats, cheeseeatingsurrendermonkey-ophiles, etc. would be far less problematic then the big-tent two-party system we have now. I wish I didn't have to vote for Democrats who say "socialism" like it's a bad word, I wish Heather Mac Donald, David Brooks, and others didn't have to vote for Republicans who don't live up to their standards of "excellence," and, yes, I wish Palin supporters could back her without having to justify their opinions to people within their own party.
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I really appreciate Bill Bishop's well-argued point in Slate today that there is no women's vote, or even white women's vote, at stake in this election. The idea is that the categories are too broad to be meaningful; even two women of the same race and class who went to the same high school or college may have too little in common to be targeted effectively by the same advertising message. Instead, campaigns should slice and dice by lifestyle—VW-driving moms who don't own TVs, city-dwelling twentysomethings who drink diet soda religiously. We each deserve our own personally tailored message!
OK, I get it, and I bow to the marketing gods of fine dicing—with two caveats. First, I rue the tedious quest for the next great swing voting bloc (soccer moms, hockey moms, offended military wives). Bishop is really arguing against this, because based on his thesis there is no identifiable swing group big enough to get your hands around, at least nationally speaking. But if we forget to dice finely enough, we end up back in the land of the Red Lobster exurbs. Second, I wonder if Bishop's argument about class holds entirely true, at least if you factor in geography. Do white women who make less than $50,000 a year and live in southern Ohio, say, really fracture into lots of little voting pieces? Do white women who make more than $100,000 a year and live in Miami?
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It's unbelievable that Christopher Buckley has been asked to clean out his cubby at the magazine his father founded—"briskly'' allowed to resign for the sin of endorsing Obama. Where the National Review thinks it'll find another writer who can throw around Jane Austen's favorite verb quite the way he does, I aver I don't know. (See? Not even close.) But apparently, even they can't have any damn intellectuals hanging around thinking outside the talking points. Isn't the point of any debate—political or otherwise—that you don't know where an open mind will take you? Hardly worth the trouble if you're required to wind up the same place every single time.
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May I treat this blog as a touchy-feely women’s group for a moment and share something that happened to me this weekend? I was walking with my 2-year-old daughter in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park when, coming over a hill, we caught sight of a huge American flag—I’m talking huge, like half the size of a football field—spread out over the grass of the great lawn. Kids were running up and down the length of the flag while grown-ups sat cross-legged at intervals, sewing on stars and stripes. As it turned out, this was part of a local Obama fundraiser called the Mending Bee for Change; you could contribute by buying a star or get sponsored to stitch the flag.
I didn’t have a cent on me, so my only contribution was a grass stain created when my kid went for a vigorous roll on Old Glory. But something about seeing that homemade parachute-silk flag spread out on the grass, being quietly mended by some and merrily trampled by others, gave me a feeling I don’t think I’ve had in its pure form since childhood: I guess you could call it patriotism, but really it was more like (to use a word that’s nearly been denuded of meaning in this endless campaign) hope. It was just so moving to experience the American flag, not as something politicians brandish to prove a point (I wear one on my lapel! Oh yeah, well, I wear a big sparkly one on my lapel! Hey, I propose amendments against burning them!), but as something for people to gather around, dance on, and mend.
I’m not a believer in the Obamessiah by any stretch—in fact, I pity whichever one of the candidates inherits the mess we’re in. Especially with the economic wreckage now being handed to him, how can our next leader not be a disappointment? But whatever happens, we’re at a historic moment: possibly on the brink of electing an African-American president, yes, but also on the brink of ending a war, creating a national health-care program, and (O frabjous day!) sending George Bush off to cut brush in Crawford, Texas, forever. On Saturday I allowed myself, for a moment, to imagine my future self telling my grown daughter about the time she played ghost underneath an enormous American flag. That was right before Obama got elected, I’d say, and things started to change.
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Rachael, I hate to be the one to have to break it to you, but you are an intellectual. (And I'm not sure when intellectual became such a dirty word.) You were valedictorian of your high-school class. You went to college. You are educated. You are learned. You had to read a few books and understand at least a couple of levels for that to have happened. And you work for the liberal New York media elite! (You don't get off pretending you are "regular folk" just because you live in Ohio!)
But being an intellectual is about more than just reading books or "plowing through studies." It simply means someone who uses their intellect rather than just their emotion. Someone who can think something out and give a reasoned, supported response, rather than simply take an uninformed stance out of fear or ignorance or laziness. (For example, voting the same way their parents do simply because they know of no other way.)
You say,
I've shaped—and reshaped—my beliefs and opinions through years and years of life experience, from debating others and even arguing with myself, from listening to viewpoints both similar to mine and different.
So you've heard other opinions and let them affect you? You've reasoned things out? You've argued with your own points of view? Intellectual!!!
And:
There are times I've struggled with my support for Republicans (though not always for the reasons you might think). I've got a lot of internal conflict about John McCain and Sarah Palin.
You've struggled with your own beliefs? You have internal conflicts? You don't just blindly follow the crowd and follow party lines? Intellectual!!!
I think what thinking people both liberal an conservative object to is not people who believe differently than they do if their beliefs are reasoned, thought out, and supportable, but people whose beliefs come not from the intellect (or even from emotion) but from prejudice, fear, laziness, or ignorance. Not voting for Obama because he is black, because his middle name is Hussein, because he's different, because one believes the rumors that have been spread about him rather than trying to find the truth.
It goes both ways. Not voting for McCain because he's old. There's also been a lot of age discrimination in this campaign that no one has talked about. Not voting for Sarah Palin because she sounds like a bumpkin.
There are plenty of "intellectuals" who aren't book smart, but who debate things: how best to raise their children, which candidate is best, which policy is best, why certain aspects of their religion don't make sense. That's nothing to be ashamed of!
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Rachael, I don't guess I know that many people who think of themselves as intellectuals—or would say so out loud, at any rate, no matter how much they love kicking around ideas. (My mom described me that way once, in anger, and it was soooo not a compliment. "Who died and made you Lionel Trilling, missy?'' was the drift, and doubtless with good reason.)
I did work for an intellectual at one point—and I know this because he spoke of it constantly; in fact, he talked so much about his own heapin' helpin' of smarts that one wondered, as he would have said, how wide-ranging his great thoughts really were.
Public intellectuals in recent political life? Obama would be the first in the White House since ... Woodrow Wilson? (Or can a rip-roaring racist ever qualify as such?) Otherwise, we've had Pat Moynihan, by any standard, Al Gore, as a great prophet and popularizer of science and technology he was quick to grasp the significance of, Bill Bradley in his own mind, thanks to John McPhee, and uh ... not Bill Clinton, though he is definitely 10 kinds of smart. I guess no Republicans spring to mind because they've been running against the Ivory Tower crowd for as long as I can remember.
What does it even mean to be living the life of the mind in this moment of the body/age of the Internet/time of the more, faster, ruder, and right now? I had a French boyfriend—yes, this was after the war—who defined an intellectual as anyone compelled to "passer des nuits blanches'' for the sheer pleasure of it, in the grip of a book. But to then brag about it? Pas sexy, even in France. And in this country, our challenge seems to be to find that middle ground—your favorite spot, Rachael—between pride in mediocrity and pointless showing off. Aspiring to know more should be a given and shared goal rather than, as you say, just another way to divide us into haves and (ha-ha, you down there) have-nots.
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Perhaps it was the overblown coverage of her every move and misstep or perhaps I too have come down with a case of Palin fever. But last Friday, as I read the details of the report confirming that Palin abused her power as governor to get her brother-in-law fired, I was bored.
Troopergate is a significantly more severe infraction than anything she's been accused of since we first met Palin (babygate, rape kits, mochagate) and this time we know she's really guilty. This also isn't a partisan attack (although the McCain spokespeople were quick to categorize it that way): A bipartisan committee of Alaska lawmakers handed down the 263-page conclusive report.
My reserved reaction stemmed from a belief that Palin would live this scandal down. She pretty much already has. Part of her appeal is that everyone, whether or not they like and agree with her, knows a Sarah Palin. And it is more likely that she'll ascend to the vice presidency than be taken down by something as universally relatable as wanting to get back at the man who did her sister wrong.
Republican voters aren't so ignorant or permissive as to condone how Palin did what she did, but she's demonstrated a resilient ability to spin positive. Maybe the "no-good brother-in-law" deserved what he got. Maybe Washington and Wall Street abuse their power more than Palin ever dreamed of doing and this ethically unsound move demonstrates her maverick ability to buck the reins. It doesn't matter really: Palin's excuses are secondary to her charms. After the short-lived MSM flogging, I think Palin remains, to many, just one of the folks. And as the story behind her infamous Newsweek cover was quick to announce: That's the real problem.
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I'm just catching up on the Palin-Bush "I.Q." discussion, and there is just one point (OK, maybe two) I wanted to address. Juliet, I don't know anyone who feels a "nearly blood-thirsty anger against people who read books," and I think it's an unfair characterization. What makes people angry, and blood-thirsty, if we must go there, is when elites and intellectuals condescend to everyone else and belittle their views. (A point that Melinda makes astutely in her latest post.) In this democracy of ours, we all get a vote. It doesn't matter if you have read the complete works of James and Faulkner or if the highlight of your week is the latest issue of People magazine.
I think it also creates an us-vs.-them mentality that is neither accurate nor helpful. Me, I would love to be an "intellectual." I would love to find eight layers of meaning in each novel I read and be able to sit down with studies on topics that interest me and just plow through them. But I'm not. My brain doesn't work like that. But that doesn't mean I'm unthinking or lack curiosity. I think the vast, vast majority of us live somewhere in the middle.
I don't doubt that there are some people who proudly call themselves anti-intellectual (and I honestly don't think that "governing from the gut," as you write of President Bush, is the same thing at all). I think most people who fall into the category, whether they'd call themselves that are not, are too consumed by everyday concerns—working hard, paying the bills, maybe raising kids or taking care of elderly parents, and trying to squeeze it all in before collapsing in a heap at the end of the day—to worry about the same things that elites do. And when they're tired or stressed out, they really don't like being told their views are worth less than someone else's.
You also write that you commend conservatives for leaving the GOP but wish they should have done so earlier. I've shaped—and reshaped—my beliefs and opinions through years and years of life experience, from debating others and even arguing with myself, from listening to viewpoints both similar to mine and different. I would suspect that liberals do the same thing, and I can't imagine having suggested four years ago that people abandon their beliefs or their party just because John Kerry was an inferior candidate. I'm not ashamed of my party affiliation. There are times I've struggled with my support for Republicans (though not always for the reasons you might think). I've got a lot of internal conflict about John McCain and Sarah Palin. But if there's anything that steels my resolve, if there's anything that allows me to stride confidently into the voting booth, it's hearing that Republicans should "leave a sinking ship" or reading comments from people (as I read earlier today) who wish that misfortune would befall John McCain and Sarah Palin.
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Please tell me that this conversation re: the "small-town mentality'' and presumption of intellect based on proximity to the great minds of the Ivy League is some kind of parody; the whole smarter-than-thou thing is part of why people at those McCain-Palin rallies are so angry. (Well, that and the shameless fear-mongering.) It's why the GOP's Lee Greenwood and pork rinds schtick stuck—and why until the disaster of the Bush years, the little guy had been trending Republican for quite some time. What I never understand is why smart people don't see that, so feel free to fill me in.
I don't agree with Palin on most matters, or think her qualified for the presidency, but why would I assume that's because she "never heard of the books that Bush didn't bother to read'' or surrounds herself with those "just dumb as her''? Those who knew young Sarah, the teacher's daughter, in fact remember her as a voracious reader. (And dumb as she we too can be; misunderestimating her is a whopping error, and one we should have learned to steer clear of by now.) Anti-intellectualism and elitism are both unattractive, but only one of them is damaging the Democratic Party.
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Anne, Marjorie, and Hanna:
Thanks to you all for your considered responses to the question I posed earlier—about whether there's any discernible difference between Palin's ability to lead the country and Bush's. Initially, I argued that there isn't, and that's why it's perplexing that so many conservatives are denouncing McCain's veep pick when they didn't say boo about Bush.
You've all mentioned, in one way or another, the fact that Bush belongs to a political family, whereas Palin does not. The logic is that Bush must've picked up something or other at the dinner table, and then at Andover, Yale, and Harvard—that he was assigned important books, even if he never read them, and that makes all the difference. All Palin's done is run a tiny little town and then govern a state that's so oil rich it doesn't need much governing. She's never heard of the books that Bush didn't bother to read.
So here's my follow-up: Bush may have a better, more reassuring pedigree, but he panders to the same contingent as Palin. And, in my opinion, you are who you pander to. Bush, inauthentically, cast himself as a dude from the heartland unspoiled by D.C. like the tree-hugging Al Gore or the French-speaking Kerry. He sold himself to America as an anti-intellectual who governs from the gut. Palin is doing the exact same thing, only authentically.
Hanna, you say the difference in authenticity is what's freaking out the conservative press corp—that Christopher Buckley, et al., could tolerate fake anti-elitism, but not real anti-elitism. You may be right, but that doesn't make complete sense to me. Bush pandered to people who dismiss book-readers as eggheads, and so he governed like a person who dismisses book-readers as eggheads. Shiite, Sunni, what's the difference? Who cares? Let's just get in there! The military can muddle through. Stem-cell research? Fuhget about it. Torture? I'll let my veep figure that one out.
I give credit to the conservatives who are speaking out against the worrisome anti-intellectual trend in the GOP—but I think they should've said something eight years ago.
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Juliet,
I think this is going to turn out to be a real crisis moment for the conservative movement. The difference between Palin and Bush is: He was just pretending to be regular folk from the heartland, whereas she actually is. Bush was perfect for the conservative movement. (As was Reagan, in a different way.) Bush could masterfully pull off the act of being a struck-by-the-light evangelical from Texas. But the Buckleys and the Frums and the Brookses of the world all knew that actually, he was safe--an Ivy Leaguer from the landed gentry who was just playing a necessary role.
Palin, on the other hand, really tests this faux populism the party leaders have been peddling for so long. Now, the elder Buckley's test--faculty of Harvard or first 2,000 names in the Boston phone book--is real. Palin comes from the latter category, and it ain't looking pretty.
Before his column today, Brooks told a luncheon crowd that Palin was a fatal cancer on the Republican Party. A week earlier, he'd praised her debate performance as fluid, confident, energetic--piled on the compliments. Either he is just hoping for the best and can't make up his mind. Or he said at a private luncheon what he really believes. Either way it seems the movement is headed for a brain freeze, as all its best thinkers desert.
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Juliet,
I hate to be in the position of defending President Bush, especially when it comes to his level of intelligence, but I have to say I disagree that he and Sarah Palin are cut from the same aptitude cloth. As you noted, Bush does have more executive experience, (He actually came into office after having been governor of Texas for two consecutive four-year terms.) but beyond experience I think the two have other fundamental differences. Despite his narrow-mindedness, his inability to admit mistakes, his mangling of the English language, and his not always being able to communicate effectively to the public, Bush can on occasion string together coherent sentences. I also get the sense that he does understand complex policy issues even if he's not good at articulating or managing them. I know he was a C student (and so was John McCain, by the way), but the man did go to Harvard and Yale, even if it was by way of a legacy acceptance. And even if he spent most of his time in college boozing and cheerleading, he had to have learned something at these institutions even if it was through osmosis/diffusion by being around all those great minds.
Bush also comes from a political family and understands politics on a much more sophisticated level than Palin. Judging from news reports about Palin's administration, she is clearly a lightweight with a very small town mentality who, instead of surrounding herself with people smarter than herself (which would have been the intelligent thing to do), surrounded herself with friends who are--how shall we say it delicately?--just as dumb as her. (Think of Palin's agriculture secretary who said her love of cows qualified her for the job.) Bush's team was dangerously ideological, wrongheaded on so many issues, and not good for the country, but no one can argue that they weren't smart and well-educated. I don't get the sense that Palin can grasp complex policy issues. I think Bush understands full well what's happening with the economy; I don't think Palin does.
Though I may disagree with Bush's worldview, at least he has a worldview. He understood immigration coming into the White House, he knew a bit about Latino culture, he tried to learn a little Spanish. He knows a handful of people of color and even put some of them in his Cabinet. What gives me pause about Palin is not her limited executive experience, it's her limited education (six colleges before she finally got a degree), her almost absent worldview, the fact that she has not traveled anywhere (gassing up in Ireland notwithstanding), and has not been around a whole lot of people different from herself. For god sakes last weekend she spoke of "our neighboring country of Afghanistan." And just because she can deliver prepared zingers at debates and rallies like a pro, I don't believe for a minute that her dismal interview performances were isolated events. What's worse is that she believes the Republican hype about herself and that is the ultimate example her lack of self-awareness. I think part of being intelligent is knowing your shortcomings and limitations, and being able to admit what you don't know, and what you're not qualified to do. Palin doesn't have a clue.
We in the "liberal media" are always accused of condescending to the conservatives and smearing them for being all of one mind, I'm actually glad to see that some of them have not drank the Kool-Aid and are thinking out of the box and, dare we say it, acting on principle instead of politics.
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Seems to me, Juliet, that it's not just sexism that is driving conservatives away from Sarah Palin in droves. It's déjà vu. I write here as one who heard President Bush speak a few times during his first trip to Europe in the summer of 2001 and was impressed: He didn't sound as stupid as one had been led to believe; he seemed to have a feel for history; one was inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt—and what a mistake that was.
I was also inclined to give Palin the benefit of the doubt for a few days—until she opened her mouth and started babbling about Putin coming into our airspace. This time I'm not giving her an extra year to get her talking points straight. Once burned, twice shy: Personally, I've had it with politicians from "the heartland" who haven't ever thought much about foreign countries or national issues. I don't care how good their "instincts" are or how "authentic" their political experience: If that experience doesn't include a large dose of foreign travel and a long acquaintance with the history of health care and Social Security reform, then they aren't qualified for the White House.
Besides, a few years spent writing about Congress taught me to be wary of allegedly "conservative" politicians who talk very loudly about "getting the government off our backs" but scramble for subsidies on behalf of their constituents at every opportunity. There is some evidence that Palin falls into this subgroup as well, or has at times. Haven't we been there, done that, already, too?
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It's official: Same-sex couples can now enter legally recognized marriages in three American states—Massachusetts, California, and Connecticut. (Countries include Belgium, Canada, the Netherlands, South Africa, and Spain ... I don't think I've missed any nations, but a Scandinavian country might have snuck in while I wasn't paying attention. All the other developed countries, except for the United States, have some kind of partner recognition for same-sex pairs, roughly equivalent to Vermont's and New Jersey's civil unions, as do a handful of Latin American countries' provinces or states.)
Connecticut's Supreme Court issued its decision about an hour ago. I haven't had a chance to read it, but I wanted to congratulate the 3.5 million residents of the state directly to my south on joining my state in treating its lesbian and gay couples as fully and honorably equal. (More info about the decision will be appearing here.)
I do hope that the voters of California—who will have a chance on Nov. 4 to either undo or uphold their state's gender-neutral marriages—will take heart from being joined by another New England state. California's anti-marriage forces have been lying in their television ads, saying that California's marriage code will force churches to marry same-sex couples even if that's against their religious beliefs. That's just false. Nobody's hurt when the state recognizes that two women or two men can and do promise to care for each other for life—and need the legal tools to fulfill the obligations they make in those vows.
Mazel tov to Connecticut! Considering the catastrophic financial headlines lately, how lovely to get some good news!
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First it was David Frum; then George Will followed by David Brooks; then Frum's colleague at the National Review, Kathleen Parker; today, William F. Buckley's son, Christopher jumped on the band wagon. Conservatives everywhere are denouncing McCain's veep pick because, essentially, they think she isn't smart enough to lead the country. True, they focus on the experience or rather the inexperience question, but it's transparent enough that what's sent conservatives into a tizzy is that Palin can't speak let alone process complex ideas. As Parker put it, she's just "Clearly Out Of Her League." I couldn't agree more. But here's what I don't get—since when do conservatives care about smarts? Or, rather, why didn't they care about smarts in 2000 and 2004?
Watching Sarah Palin talk to Katie Couric, and then watching her at the debate (where, admittedly, she did better than expected) gave me déjà vu. She's really very similar to Bush, and it's not at all obvious to me that she's any worse than he is, or was in 2000 and 2004. Maybe Bush isn't stupid, exactly, just lazy. And Palin's not stupid, exactly, either—just supremely uninformed. But ultimately, what's the difference? Either of these qualities should disqualify someone from running the country.
As Leopold Bloom put it (or thought it), "a defect is 10 times worse in a woman." He meant physical defects, but I wonder if this charming bit of sexism applies to mental defects, too. Why is Sarah Palin pushing Christopher Buckley over the edge—he's voting for Obama!—when Bush didn't?
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On Wednesday, Fox News aired a segment in which it berated Newsweek for not retouching a photo of Sarah Palin that ran on its Oct. 13 cover. (You can see a good close-up here.)
The photo is clearly untouched: stray eyebrow hair, large pores, and wrinkles are all visible on her face. The headline reads "She's One of The Folks (And that's the problem)." But the outrage isn't about the headline at all; it's about the photo. When did untouched become "unfair," as a Republican media consultant claims during the segment? And when did it become a requirement to retouch photos in news magazines rather than fashion ones?
The consultant went on to claim that the photo was "mortifying." Maybe the photo is a little unflattering--who can expect to look great that close up--but mortifying? It's also ridiculous that the three women on the segment prefaced their statements by some form of "Sarah Palin is a beautiful woman." We get it.
If I were Palin, I would upset. Not at the magazine, but at these women who can only talk about her as a "beautiful woman."
And this isn't sexist treatment?
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Rachael is so not our Elisabeth Hasselbeck! And seriously, Ellen, how are we divisive? Au contraire, I'd say we are a model of comity - the U.N. of blogs, really, only with no corruption and no Libya on the Security Council. We've been at this for a year now - come to think of it, why haven't we celebrated that? - and despite disagreeing on minor matters like abortion and war have hardly ever even gotten hot at each other. On no occasion I can recall has anyone been so much as borderline disrespectful, which has got to be some kind of miracle, if you believe in such things, which I do; see how diverse we are? (Or is that too Sarah Palin for ya? Maybe we are the Midwest of blogs!) I guess the bottom line is that I don't even believe there is an us and a them, and think Obama's right when he says that there's not this vast chasm between us at all; in fact, compared to political differences in other countries, our right and left are close enough to slow dance. For proof, just listen to the candidates last night, much of the time saying the exact same thing, even down to telling that one poor woman in the audience that she was understandably cynical. (I was thinking oh, Obama's lost her vote, until McCain came up behind him and called her the exact same thing.) Anyway, happy birthday to us, and to all of you who are off tomorrow, Tzom Kal. (OK, Emily B. just taught me that earlier today; see, we are still learning about each other...)
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I know being chosen is supposed to be a great honor, but I feel oddly protective of Matani Shakya, the newly appointed 3-year-old goddess in Nepal. When not being "wheeled around on a chariot pulled by devotees" the kumari toddler will reside in a palatial temple until she hits puberty. She will then, sadly, get tossed for a new baby deity. Harsh reality, that. Where do ex-goddesses go for therapy?
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Back to basics for a second here. We are getting rather divisive on "XX Factor" itself. True, I do not get Rachael's politics. I consider her a friend and a colleague and I admire her competence and her smarts, but on politics, she and I are on opposite ends of the spectrum. I don't get it.
But I want to.
I wish I could wake up one day with a conservative brain and see the world as Rachael sees it and see how the things she believes can make sense to her. I wish someone made conservative-colored glasses that I could try on. Oddly, I come from a family of conservatives, and I still don't get it.
I also feel bad that Rachael is surrounded by liberals. I imagine it's a bit how I'd feel if I worked at Fox News (don't overthink that comparison, please). And I feel bad that McCain and Palin are the candidates that Rachael is being put in a position to defend when their behavior is at times indefensible. I think we all agree that it is absolutely great to have Rachael's intelligent voice on XX Factor, especially since we don't all agree on the many topics we discuss here, and having her here leads to some lively debate, and hopefully some understanding.
But.
I think we are forgetting something. Obama, McCain, Biden, and Palin are first and foremost politicians. Palin is not of the heartland; she does not even feel of the heartland to me. Look at her wardrobe for one. I don't know anyone of the heartland who has a wardrobe like that. In fact, I live in New York City. I have freelanced at Vogue magazine. Even the people who work at Vogue don't have wardrobes like hers. She is wealthy. She is a celebrity. She is a politician. She is not like you and me. Her claims to the heartland are a pose meant to appeal to the Republican fantasy of the average American.
But neither are the others like you and me. They are all wealthy, educated (or, if you prefer: elitist) politicians. They are all posing.
Often it comes down to whose pose you believe in more, whose pose feels more authentic. Bill Clinton was a great poser.
Palin's "regular gal" pose feels particularly transparent. McCain is posing as a dyed-in-the-wool pro-life Republican (I remember I used to like him before he became a candidate in this election and was being himself more). Biden is posing as someone who would be happy in the No. 2 spot and agrees 100 percent with Obama's positions. And Obama is posing as ... I'm not sure what, exactly ... the candidate who cares?
I remember listening to a speech of his several months ago, and a line from a Joni Mitchell song popped into my head, "Pretty lies, when you gonna realize they're only pretty lies ..."
I love what Obama talks about. I want to believe. Please don't let him be telling us pretty lies. But this is what all politicians do, don't they? They make campaign promises—that they have no intention of keeping or that they are incapable of enacting once in office.
But I like what Obama is saying. He is at least saying the right things. McCain is not. In my humble opinion. And Palin is definitely not. She jumped right on the lying bandwagon so quickly, it makes me a little sick. Maybe she's a Washington outsider, but she has learned to be sleazy in record time. My sense is that she doesn't even know McCain that well, and yet she is willing to say whatever she has to—morals, ethics, common decency be damned.
I was particularly impressed with Obama when after Bristol Palin's pregnancy became known and a reporter asked him what he thought, he said that the families of candidates are off-limits, particularly the children. That's class. I can only imagine how the Republicans would have buried him if he'd had a pregnant daughter who was Bristol's age.
I don't think that even McCain believes what he's saying. "My friends," is a stall so he can think of his next talking point, the talking points devised by the party to get him elected.
But, back to the point. Let us not be so entrenched behind our candidates of choice that we cannot be critical of all of them. They are, after all, just politicians. Even Obama, whose pose is so convincing that I really hope it's not a pose at all.
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Rachael: I have been on the road, but I didn’t want to leave your very smart post unanswered. You and I are in complete agreement that American political discourse has taken a turn for the despicable in recent weeks, and that we are ill-served by the ugliness. But I am going to stand by my claim that campaigns send a message to their supporters about the legitimacy of hating, and that Sarah Palin and John McCain have not just condoned but encouraged it as their campaign has faltered in recent weeks. Americans who are explicitly charged to rage against the press will—as Dana Milbank reported yesterday—happily attack them (racial epithets evidently optional). Americans told that Obama pals around with domestic terrorists may just holler “kill him” in response. Americans repeatedly instructed—as Marjorie wrote yesterday—to view Obama as “not like us” or “not a man who sees America the way you and I see America” cannot be faulted for believing that racism and xenophobia are legitimate modes of political conversation. And I am glad you brought up Obama’s guns and bitterness statement because it highlights the difference between Obama and Palin: Obama’s San Francisco statement was not an attack on gun owners. It was an admittedly artless effort to understand and explain why people in small towns might become single-issue voters. You can call his remarks elitist; they were. But it would be wildly unfair to suggest he was saying those voters are un-American, or irrelevant or unworthy of being engaged. Nobody listening to Obama’s words about small-town voters that day would have responded with “kill them” or “sit down, boy!” These are not small rhetorical differences. Palin is a desperate candidate who seeks to stir up regional and racial hatred and should be held accountable for the way her supporters respond. You and I both agree that the name-calling is cheap and coarsening. I will go one further and say that anyone who believes that some Americans are irrelevant because of their skin color, religion, or hometown is leading her followers right into the abyss we both deplore.
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I didn't hear every word of the debate, because along with most of the other passengers waiting for the 10:35 flight from JFK to National, I was straining to make out what the candidates were saying over the general airport din, plus the patter of an Australian guy who found McCain ridiculous—his mention of Obama's support for a slide projector in a planetarium struck him as especially hilarious—and an unhappy Republican who grumbled, "Nothing new, nothing new'' every time "that one'' opened his mouth. Though they proved oblivious to the subtle cues the rest of us were working so hard on, leaning forward intently and frowning, a whole planeload of us non-Washington insiders nevertheless refrained from telling these two to zip it; from Wasilla to the Upper West Side, Americans are in some ways shockingly well-behaved.
From what I could tell, however, the candidates were as rude as their hecklers, proclaiming the questions excellent and then ignoring them. (I did not think McCain calling Obama "that one'' was so insulting, though; I could be wrong, but I thought he meant to do it jokingly —sort of like Tina Fey and Amy Poehler always calling each other "this one''—and didn't quite pull it off.) Their mutual refusal to stray from their stump speeches is what offended me; we're in a crisis here, as we all agree, yet most of what they had to say last night was a remix of the same old musty talking points they've been spouting for months. And with McCain pacing around behind Obama, with all the glassy-eyed steadiness of that New York mafia don who used to pad around in his bedroom slippers pretending to be out of it while secretly still running the whole operation, I at one point thought they might burst into song, call it a comic opera, and basta. McCain's "cut taxes and earmarks" aria really was ridiculous, mate, and Obama's "the middle class needs a rescue package'' refrain so vague that it really was "nothing new, nothing new.'' Sadly, I'm not sure the rest of us who were leaning forward so expectantly missed a single thing we hadn't heard before.
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During the vice-presidential debate, I had to keep tearing my gaze away from the CNN ticker with the reactions of undecided voters, which was tracking men separately from women. The sexual politics of politics—how could it not be riveting? Except that, after about five minutes, it wasn't. All it led me to was the basic and obvious observation that women seemed to be higher on the + scale than men, over and over again. They also seemed to dislike hearing the Republican line on the Iraq war more.
Tonight the male/female split tracker was back. And again, women seemed more positive, more excited, more supportive of Barack Obama. And they seemed to twist the dial harder toward disapproval when the topic was the Bush administration's record. Men, meanwhile, seemed to stick closer to the middle of the dial. Because they were more cautious? Less excitable? More bored? Less interested?
Who knows. And maybe I missed some moments in which women thrilled to John McCain, or men did, because I confess that I myself was close to flatlining. But I've decided that I think this men/women ticker is merely reductionist. There's no context, no way of understanding what the differences mean. The separate lines are presented as if they have significance without any way of discerning what that significance could be. Men are from campaign Mars, and Women are from electoral Venus, with no insight about what it's like on either planet.
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Here's a matter that knows no party or region or class: flowers, which I must remember to teach my son are not always such a thoughtful gift. One of my dearest friends celebrated a big, big birthday last week. And what did her husband do to mark the milestone? "He went to the Kroger's for flowers,'' she said, rocked by the care and consideration that went into his offering. So to the three men reading this, don't let this be you. Flowers for no reason? Such a sure thing that if she doesn't like them, you should worry. But flowers under pressure say you are so clueless or checked-out that you might as well sign the note, "I'm either passive-aggressive, or have absolutely no imagination.'' The bigger the occasion, the better that "World's Best Mom'' mug would have gone over in comparison;as my friend said of her fool for romance, "He is beyond hope.'' (And Liza, since you wrote the book on Barack's better half, do we know what he wound up getting Michelle for their anniversary? Please do not tell me it was mums ...)
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You know, Rachael is also saying something important here, something we forget at our own peril: Looking down on Mr. and Mrs. Middle America isn't smart, and it IS what smarty-pants liberals in Washington (and beyond!) sometimes do. (And why is that? Would we rather show off than win?) Case in point: Richard Cohen, in a column in today's Washington Post, sneering that those who praised Sarah Palin's debate performance must have "inferred that her performance would go over well in homes with aboveground swimming pools.'' (For some reason, this makes me want to pass the Boone's Farm and push him into the cement pond; ugh.) 'Nother one: Tim Robbins on the Daily Show last night, praying to God for a smart president this time around. With the economy heading for Argentina, such slights may not matter as much as they otherwise would. But they're still hateful—and until the votes are counted, downright dumb.
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Dahlia,
I also agree with you about Sarah Palin being a divider not a uniter. Over the last few days she has been going after Obama in racially coded language in her attempts to link him to '60s-era radical Bill Ayers. I find this dismaying and dangerous. When she says Obama "is not like us," or that he doesn't "share our values," she is signaling to her mostly white audiences that they should be worried and fearful of this guy, who is not only black but also a closet Muslim who hangs out with domestic terrorists. (Read: unpatriotic black militant.) For someone who can't speak with any intelligence, or in a coherent sentence, on the substantive issues, she sure is well-versed in the politics of personal destruction.
As for Rachael's view that Palin's experience might not scream "heartland," but her personality does, I must say I'm doubtful her down home, aw-shucks personality is real. It screams shtick and feels forced. It reminds me of someone who is faking authenticity. I was also amused by how she cited soccer moms like herself worrying about the economy and feeling "fear regarding the few investment that some of us have in the stock market," making it sound as if she is of modest means. And the next day we learn that she and the first dude are worth $1.5 million. Real authenticity does not need to be announced and showcased at every turn. Palin is wearing a flashing neon light saying: "I'm authentic! I'm authentic!"
As for her now suddenly remembering that golly gee, jiminy cricket she does actually read newspapers, specifically the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and the Economist, I guess that would explain her wide-ranging expertise on foreign policy issues.
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Dahlia,
You're absolutely right, of course, to say that Sarah Palin has been a divider, not a uniter. I didn't see it because I wasn't looking for it. Even though I'm in a bit of a unique situation—I'm geographically planted in Ohio while spending my days virtually on the East Coast—at the end of the day, I'm one of those average folks in Middle America to whom Palin is speaking.
But if we can continue our conversation, I think it's important, while ackowledging the negativity, to ask, what does Sarah Palin have to gain from reaching out to East Coast elites, to the "residents of downtown Seattle" as you write? (And I think we can all agree that no one has ever lost points for running against "Washington insiders," right?) How many votes will that get her? Let's look at the reaction to her nomination. Obama spokesman Bill Burton made fun of the fact she was a small-town mayor (yes, Obama issued his own more tactful statement shortly after). Nancy Pelosi questioned John McCain's judgment. In the days between her debut in Dayton, Ohio, and her convention speech, critics and media members questioned her ability to juggle a campaign and an infant with Down syndrome, made fun of her kids' names, and demanded to see her son Trig's birth certificate. One of my personal favorite reactions came from the day after the speech, when the New York Times' David Carr wrote that before Palin arrived in St. Paul that "there was a lot of sniggering in media rooms and satellite trucks about her beauty queen looks and rustic hobbies, and the suggestion that she was better suited to be a calendar model for a local auto body shop than a holder of the second-highest office in the land" and, later, that "journalists wrinkled their noses in disgust when Piper, Ms. Palin's youngest daughter, was filmed kitty-licking her baby brother's hair into place. But to many Americans—including some I talked to in the convention hall—that looked like family church on Sunday, evidence of good breeding and sibling regard." [Emphasis mine.] I give him credit for his candor and for actually seeking out what ol' Joe and Jane Six-Pack thought of that moment, but what on earth can Sarah Palin do or say to win over people who think it's disgusting when a little girl spit-shines her tiny brother's hair, who chuckle about a governor as a "auto body shop" pinup girl? Since the financial crisis has hit, she has spoken to the concerns of all Americans, pointing out that she and her husband can relate because they've taken a hit in their 401(k) and their savings and because they worry about sending their kids to college. But I know you're looking for more from her. That's fair, and it's something the Republicans might regret if they lose this election.
You are also right that Obama gave an incredible speech at the 2004 convention. (His speech on race during the primaries was excellent, too.) I thought it was refreshing and different. But let's not forget that he also felt compelled to tell his wealthy audience at a San Francisco fundraiser that when people in other parts of the country struggle, "they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them." Let's not forget that he came to Ohio during the primaries and said he opposed NAFTA and criticized Hillary Clinton for supporting it, only to have an economic adviser reassure the Canadians that Obama wasn't about "fundamentally changing" the agreement. Obama talks of hope and change and uniting us all, but when push comes to shove, he can be just like any other politician, saying what he has to say to get elected.
If Obama wins, I hope he can be transformative, that he can make progress in helping Americans set aside their differences. I'm not such a partisan that I want to endure four years of misery just so the Republicans can take back the White House in 2012. If McCain wins and the "pit bull in lipstick" is down the hall in the West Wing, I hope they can accomplish the same thing. But, just like Palin said in her debate with Joe Biden, that in response to he credit crisis Americans need to step up and stop taking on debt that they can't afford and live within their means, the same goes for our discourse. We're not going to get anywhere, regardless of who's president, as long as we're calling one another Dumbocrats and Rethuglicans. If someone wants to convince me that President Bush is the devil, they shouldn't start out by calling him Chimpy McBushitler. Here in the friendly confines of our little blog, we tend to limit ourselves to healthy and respectful debate, but that doesn't happen everywhere.
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Dahlia, you've put your finger on the reason my initial enthusiasm for Sarah Palin evaporated the minute she opened her mouth; it isn't her conservatism that rankles, but her bile. (Today, for example, she accused Obama of "palling around with terrorists who would target their own country'' because he happened to serve on a charity board on education reform with a '60s radical whose views he has denounced. According to the New York Times story Palin was referencing—and deliberately misrepresenting—"[t]he two men do not appear to have been close. Nor has Mr. Obama ever expressed sympathy for the radical views and actions of [William] Ayers, whom he has called 'somebody who engaged in detestable acts 40 years ago, when I was 8.' ")
We could have disagreed on every issue in the multiverse, and I would still have applauded John McCain's choice of a strong, conservative, pro-life feminist—yes!—who actually walked the walk. But Palin's whole up-your-nose-with-a-rubber-hose presentation—it's us-vs.-them on steroids, really—gives the lie to her talk of bipartisanship. She sells herself as a can-do frontierswoman, but also as the poor-me victim of reporters so mean that they dared ask her what she believes. And her overt contempt for difference makes a joke of her promise to bring all Americans together; her loudest shout-out at the debate wasn't to third graders, but to haters. She bragged that she's such a tolerant person that "I have a very diverse family and group of friends and even within that group you would see some who may not agree with me on this issue, some very dear friends who don't agree with me on this issue'' of gay marriage. But people who really are tolerant of other viewpoints are not quite so painfully aware of their own saintly forbearance; that she finds it worth reporting that she has friends who have friends who might be gay—at least, I think that's what she said—in fact suggests a lack of respect. And except for killing her own meat, she has nothing in common with my grandma.
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My apologies, all, for being late with this. I'm en route to San Francisco for the wedding of dear friends—two fabulous and widely, deeply loved women—who've been together for 26 years. (It'll be my first Chinese wedding banquet!!) I dearly hope and pray that California voters will on Nov. 4 see fit to approve their marriage rights—and to say yes to recognizing many more such joyous marriages.
And so thank you, Abby, for noting how odiously Palin used the word tolerant in the debate. When Palin used it to talk about gay folks, she tensed up and all but wrinkled her nose, as if smelling something disgusting. In fact, although she briskly announced that she and Biden agreed, her entire way of answering the same-sex marriage questions were in very careful code that made clear how far apart she and Biden actually are.
I don't have a transcript here, but as I remember it, she carefully said that she wouldn't oppose hospital visitation or "private contracts" but that she opposed "redefining" the "traditional definition" of marriage as between one man and one woman. Now, let's leave aside both the tautology and the simple falsity of that statement; marriage has never been one static thing, but has been constantly shifting to suit each era and class, as I discovered when researching my book What Is Marriage For? More important here, though, is that Biden signaled he would support civil unions, domestic partnership, and possibly some now-banned federal recognitions like allowing an American to sponsor her foreign-born female beloved for immigration, say. (Now they'd have to move to Europe or Canada to stay together.) Most of the developed world, and some underdeveloped parts of the world, now have these interim recognitions. The U.S. anti-marriage movement has used state marriage bans to also try to erase these intermediate statuses—saying that any state recognition of a same-sex pair (even sharing health insurance benefits) is a redefinition of "traditional" (by which they mean "recent" or "conventional") marriage.
Biden was announcing, generously and enthusiastically, his support for these ABM (anything but "marriage") measures. Palin was signaling her opposition to any such things that governments might do to allow two people of one sex to honor their bond—and doing it in a way that only very attentive pro-gay and antigay folks would notice. Very smart. And not very nice for my dear California soon-to-be-newlywed long-coupled friends.
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Rachael, I think you’ve put your finger on Sarah Palin’s “heartland” problem, but perhaps not in a way for which you will thank me. Accepting your premise that Palin deploys the term not in a geographic sense, but to express her “experience, ideology, and personality,” it seems Palin can’t stop herself from using the word in the way she uses so many other regional terms: as a way to rope off the Americans who matter from those who do not.
Palin’s constant use of geographic and class code words—“East coasters,” “media elites,” and “Washington insiders”—reflects just how steeped she is in Ginsu politics: The slicing and dicing of Americans into those who deserve her respect and those who warrant only contempt. As you have eloquently observed, “People are similar wherever you go.” But Gov. Palin just does not seem to share that worldview. I am trying to think of a single sentence she has uttered that has evinced compassion for the residents of downtown Seattle or for the entire East Coast she likes to write off with a wink and a sneer. Whatever you may say about Barack Obama, his 2004 convention speech was transformative in that it renounced the view that some Americans count more than others, based on artificial geographic or religious divisions. Rachael, try as I may, I cannot think of a single compassionate, elevating, or ennobling sentiment Palin has ever expressed toward Americans with which she disagrees—unless you count parroting Ronald Reagan. I can’t think of a single instance in which she has expressed or implied that Americans have more in common than not, and that were she to be elected, she would be respectful of and accountable to all of them, including East Coasters, environmentalists, and community organizers.
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Meghan: Yes! She is a George Saunders character, with her Simuhair and Todd "the Lovemeister" Palin. But there's one important difference. Saunders' characters are drowning in some ocean of adspeak they can't find the source of and that leaves them helpless. Last night, I felt like Palin was finally master of her own jargon. In those TV interviews she kept straying into her own back alleys of weird speak. But in the debate, she tamed her folksiness into recognizable clichés (maaa-verick, Washington outsider, soccer mom). Ultimately, I think that's why conservatives were comforted by her performance. It's not that she had learned how to pronounce Ahmadinejad or memorized a health care statistic or two. It's that she suddenly sounded like a familiar political type: the folksy populist, Mrs. Smith, Ross Perot with an updo. Its amazing: In just a month, she's turned herself from a genuine outsider into a stock character on the Beltway scene. Sarah, welcome to Washington!
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Noreen,
You ask why it doesn't bother me that Sarah Palin claims a connection to the "heartland." I would chalk it up to a couple of reasons. For one, every time I see a picture from Wasilla, I'm reminded of the small town in North Dakota that my husband grew up in: the tiny city hall, the barely there downtown (except that Alaska's got all that gorgeous scenery). Though I've never been to Alaska, such images make it feel like an extension of the Great Plains, which are definitely part of the "heartland."
Secondly, I guess I take "heartland" less as a shorthand for folksiness and more as shorthand for non-big-city America. In an office conversation earlier today, our colleague Tim Noah pointed out that more Americans live in cities than in small towns, and this blog post in the Wall Street Journal looks at the numbers. The Census Bureau says that 80 percent of us live in metropolitan areas and only 20 percent elsewhere. But it's not that black and white. Some metropolitan areas dwarf others, and not every city is surrounded by the same bland, sprawling suburbs. The "suburb" I live in is actually a town that was founded in the early 1800s and has its own schools, a quaint downtown, and its own identity.
I grew up in a small town. I lived for eight years in the burbs of one our most vibrant and beautiful cities, Seattle. Now I live near Cincinnati, a place the Census Bureau would call a metropolitan area but one that feels minuscule compared with megalopolises like New York or Los Angeles and even considerably smaller than big cities like Seattle or Atlanta. One thing I've learned in my various experiences is that in many ways, people are similar wherever you go. People want a lot of the same things out of life and have many of the same concerns. And thanks to the mobility we enjoy, a lot of people in the big cities come from the heartland. But there are differences. And thank god. One of the things that I love passionately about this country is that it offers such a diversity of lifestyles. If you want to live somewhere where you can have a working-class job and still afford a sizable home for your family, where everyone knows everyone and half the town goes to the high school football games on Friday nights, there are thousands of places for that. If you want to live somewhere where you need to be an executive to afford an 800-square-foot waterfront condo that's within walking distance of Whole Foods and public transportation, well, did I mention Seattle? If you want to work 80 hours a week and be a millionaire, move to Wall Street. Want to be a surf bum or ski bum? The West is calling to you.
Noreen, my fellow Buckeye, you're from a part of Ohio that is definitely hurting more than some other parts of the heartland. I grew up in northeastern Ohio, and I remember the steel plants closing in the 1970s and my neighbors getting laid off. I remember when my grandfather moved his men's clothing store off of Main Street because the area was dying. I know how real that pain is, even if I'm more removed from it these days, and I can see why voters might think that Sarah Palin can't relate. At the same time, it's a problem that's been going on for decades, and I think people are going to be sorely disappointed if they're waiting for the federal government to fix it.
But, to circle back to your original question, when Sarah Palin says she's from the heartland, I get it on some level. Governing an oil-rich state with a budget surplus is indeed different than governing a state that is losing jobs and trying to figure out what to cut from the budget to save the schools and build roads. But most of us make our voting decisions based on a combination of a politican's skills, experience, ideology, and personality. Her experience might not scream "heartland," but her personality does.
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I couldn't help but cringe last night when Sarah Palin said the word "tolerant" three times within seconds in the debate. I hate that word.
Tolerance is widely accepted as an admirable virtue, but it still feels cheap to me. Essentially what Palin is saying is that she puts up with homosexual couples. There's no approval there, no acceptance, just respectful disregard. The difference between "tolerance" and "acceptance" is like the difference between looking the other way and actively supporting something. Her tolerant speech doesn't mean she supports, or even approves of, homosexuality. It means she just doesn't act out against it.
To be fair, neither Biden nor Palin support gay marriage. That was the one point on which they both whole-heartedly agreed last night. But Biden's answer was more political, less personal, and absolutely less grinding than Palin's, who seems to think looking away is a virtue in itself.
But maybe it's all just nuance.
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Marjorie, I couldn't agree more about Sarah Palin's convenient geographic confusion—why are people letting her get away with saying her Alaska roots give her a "connection to the heartland"? And Rachael, fellow Ohioan, why doesn't that bug you?
I get that the heartland is an easy shorthand for "folksiness." And the specifics she cited have a lot of resonance, sure: worries about a special needs child, a son in the military, the cost of college and of health care. But context is important. It's very different to be sitting around the kitchen table in Wasilla worrying about those things than it is in Ohio, where your local economy isn't hemorrhaging just jobs, but entire industries. The "heartland" she references so glibly formed its identity and its values from the industries—manufacturing, agriculture—that are rapidly changing or disappearing, and that's a large part of what makes the piecemeal worries about health care and tuition weigh far more heavily than the sum of their parts for people who live there. Palin made a big deal about American exceptionalism last night, but Alaskan exceptionalism is far more germane—as she pointed out last night, it's the "nation's only Arctic state." You can define the heartland as broadly as you want, but Alaska just isn't in it.
Alaska's economy, thanks to oil revenues, has been likened to that of Abu Dhabi. The state has a budget surplus. There are relatively few manufacturing jobs and few illegal aliens, so there's not the looming specter of losing jobs overseas or to cheaper labor here. The state has the lowest individual tax burden. She's co-opting—and cheapening—a narrative that she has had no real contact with. Living in Wasilla is nothing like living in the rapidly changing modern heartland. That bothers me on a visceral level, but what troubles me on a deeper one is that that means she has no experience in what it's like to govern in the non-Abu Dhabi parts of America and very little context that would help her learn to do so, fluency in "doggone" and "gosh darns" put aside.
There's plenty about Alaska that makes it symbolically appealing as uniquely American, and the same goes for Palin, I'm sure. But from where I'm sitting, this seems like the most plausible heartland connection she's got.
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Couldn't agree more, Ann, on Joe Biden's manner and competence and show of feeling: the real deal all around, it seemed to me. (Well, except for the cosmetic dentistry. Just like you can so be too rich or too thin, you can also have chompers that are too blindingly white, as it turns out.) Gwen Ifill did a good job as well, didn't you think? She got out of the way, and asked questions that could not possibly be heard as gotchas. (Could they?) They were unfussy, most definitely not for show, and served their purpose perfectly. Though technically, most of them did not get answered, last night also confirmed my belief that in some ways, it matters less what you ask than how you ask it, since the only real question in these situations is: Who are you? And that one always gets answered in the end.
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I know this debate was mostly about Sarah Palin, but let's not be sexist and forget about Joe Biden. I thought he was great, not least because he came across as what Palin pretends to be but isn't—and what this campaign could really use: a regular person who resists pat categorizing, rather than a caricature in a polarized drama that bears no relation to life.
I'm not saying that's Biden's usual public mode by any means: Man-off-his-meds can be more his style. But last night on the stage next to Palin, he was a guy in a dark suit who calmly confounded a script that's getting awfully tiresome. He wasn't the Elite Insider to her Maverick Outsider; the way Biden drew on his career accomplishments, he made 36 years in the Senate sound like real-world experience with real challenges for an independent minded person—not (as McCain often does) arcane ritual, and not like the vague grandstanding Palin invokes when she refers to her executive experience. He didn't come across as Professorial Wonk to her Main Street Mom, either, and not just because he said "champ" and invoked his blue-collar origins; he marshaled facts with ease, gave them punch because he knew what he was talking about, where for all her folksiness, her own patter sounded totally canned.
And he wasn't the Old Guy to her Young Gal; only six years younger than McCain, Biden may say "ladies and gentlemen," but he seems a generation apart, lacking the condescendingly old-school tone I hear in everything McCain says about his running mate. Maybe it's that Biden has a hands-on dad aura, which he comes by totally honestly. (Shouldn't we be parsing that choke-up? Seemed completely real to me.)
Race, gender, age, class, education, values, experience: This is a campaign in which both sides like to talk about surmounting divisions and bringing both sides together. But doggone it, you don't very often get to see someone just walking the walk.
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I have been racking my brain to figure out who Sarah Palin reminds me of ever since she came on the scene with her bright smile, her folksy-corporate style, and her Silly Puttied authenticity, which mirrors back at the viewer whatever talking point she's just absorbed. From the start, I've found her stylistically arresting, for reasons that have to do with her energy and her youth but also, I felt, with some dim recollection of a dark literary doppelganger ... And just now, watching the very end of the debate, it struck me: Sarah Palin reminds me of a character in a George Saunders story. Saunders writes brilliant short stories about characters trapped in the American DreamTM. They are workers at theme parks or Hooters-style restaurants, mummified in corporate-sponsored "flair" (to borrow from the brilliant film Office Space). They speak in the same style of substanceless perk. They are to humanity what MSG is to flavor. (At least, some are.) Palin is, of course, far more successful than many of Saunders' characters, and I don't make the comparison merely to caricature her but to capture what I think is crucial about her. She buys into a whole vocabulary of signifiers that often don't signify very much, and she scaffolds that lexicon with winks, smiles, and carefully mimed gestural reinforcement. All politicians employ empty rhetoric, of course. But I don't know that I've ever seen one employ superficial language with such a sense of palpable enjoyment at her (or his, of course) mastery. And just like Saunders' characters, she refuses to show vulnerability or hesitation, deploying rapid-fire prepackaged phrases like a missile shield, as if the silence that comes with groping for ideas were deadly. (Just listen to her answer about her "Achilles' heel" in the V.P. debate, and compare it with dialogue in a Saunders story.) She loves to say "maverick" and "zero-base" and to recount how she once "quasi-caved" on an issue but didn't "compromise." (Huh?)
A lot of the original media coverage of Palin was confused by things about her that derive, it seems to me, from the fact that she's a woman in the West (which Camille Paglia wrote astutely about a few weeks ago). But what's *not* Western about Palin is how avidly she's borrowed and inhabited the language of cute-can-do-ism that's exploited by companies to lull workers into taking pleasure in how much of their time is given over to "breakout sessions" and the business of being an employee. Throughout the debate, she talked like the executive she's so proud to be rather than the governor she ought to be. (It's no surprise, it occurs to me belatedly, that Saunders wrote a brilliant parody of Palin's speech patterns right after the RNC speech, which you can find here.)
Meanwhile, Biden was the tortoise to her hyper hare: He chipped away slowly and steadily and relaxed as the night progressed. And his answer about being a father and understanding what it's like to raise a child who might not make it was authoritative and emotional at the same time.
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I was teaching a class tonight (on T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land," of all texts) and so I just got home to watch the debate and read everyone's responses. A number of my XX Factor colleagues here said that the debate tonight wasn't "about" gender. I guess that's true, but on the other hand, it was, at least in one small way. On CNN, the tracked "real time" reactions of uncommitted Ohio voters were divided by sex. And boy, did Biden simply not seem to connect with male voters. Those same men seemed to like Palin, though—a lot more than the women did. The Ohio women thumbed their disapproval when Palin got cutesy ("It's 'Drill, baby, drill' "), sending her ratings down. Women *really* didn't like it when Palin talked about Iraq and the "white flag of surrender." And they loved it when Biden talked about Pakistan. Meanwhile, any time Palin turned and faced the camera, the men's ratings shot up attentively. This division may have a lot to do with issue keywords—that is, a difference in which issues mean what to the two sexes in Ohio. But it was striking nonetheless. Gender may not be an issue, but I still contend that Eros is one, and Palin just has much more charge on stage than Biden does. (I have to say, I don't think that his suit or tie helped; he seemed overdressed, overformal.)
Meanwhile, I was disappointed (if not surprised) to find that one of their few moments of total agreement concerned the issue of gay marriage. When Biden firmly said "no," neither he nor Obama supported gay marriage, I thought: *here* is politics as usual. Two candidates who've suffered discrimination in different ways (Obama, Palin) yet both defend a profound form of continued discrimination. Nice.
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Posted on behalf of XX Factor contributor Marjorie Valbrun, who's experiencing technical difficulties:
Sarah Palin pandering to Jewish voters while simultaneously being hyperbolic about the threat that Iran poses to Israel: We can't allow "a second Holocaust" against "this peace-seeking nation" where we'd one day like to place our "embassy in Jerusalem."
Sarah Palin trying to compensate for being less than worldly, unknowledgeable about foreign and domestic policy issues, and inarticulate during one-on-one interviews: "It's so obvious I'm not a Washington insider." "I may not answer the questions the way you want me to."
Sarah Palin being annoyingly and disingenuously "folksy" and "real" while trying to take the focus off McCain's record in Congress: "Now Joe there ya go again looking at the past, now. Doggone it, let's look ahead." "Can wait to get there and get with ya." "I want to send a shout out to all those third-graders at Gladys Elementary School."
Sarah Palin being geographically challenged: Referring to Alaska to describe her "connection to the heartland of America." (Since when did Alaska become the heartland of the United States?)
Sarah Palin communicating in a language other than English: "We have got not to allow ..."
I don't believe she is purposely displaying a streak of anti-intellectualism to appeal to the Republican base, as some have suggested, I think she just is really not that smart or quick on her feet. When she couldn't answer a question, she went back to her talking points and repeated the same lines over and over like a malfunctioning robot. Her small town girl witticisms aside, I heard nothing from her to reassure me that she has one iota of the emotional intelligence needed to be vice president (and possibly president) or the necessary intellectual heft.
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Posting on behalf of Emily Yoffe, who's traveling:
Biden won, but more important, Sarah Palin rehabilitated herself from being a national joke. If she’d been performing as she did tonight during her big media interviews, she would have saved all of us a lot of existential squirming. And whatever your politics, I'd rather not have one of the candidates for the second-highest office in the country appear to be a fool. This makes her less of an issue, less of Exhibit A of John McCain's bad judgment. So, doesn’t tonight's debate makes the conventional wisdom right—that the vice-presidential pick really doesn't matter that much?
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The debate is over, and the Republican base is breathing a huge sigh of relief. Sarah Palin didn't make a royal mess of the debate, something that a lot of us feared might happen after her disastrous sitdown with Katie Couric.
Yes, she benefited from the fact she didn't have to take follow-ups, and she benefited from low expectations. But she was tough and charming, and she held her own against an opponent with vastly more experience and who was on his game in his own right. She almost made me want to believe in a windfall profits tax.
This is precisely what I was hoping for. I like her personally—she's endearing, even with that accent—and we share some important beliefs. (Not all. I will cheer the day any presidential or VP candidate, Republican or Democrat, stands onstage in an important debate and calls out for marriage equality.) However inexperienced she might be, I don't want her to get the blame for taking the whole ticket down with her.
Before McCain stunned all of us with the Palin pick, the consensus is that it's rare for a vice-presidential candidate to make a big difference in the outcome of the election. But then Palin took McCain on a meteoric rise and seemed poised to take him to equally low depths. I think, or at least hope, that she halted that tonight.
I don't know if McCain is going to get a boost from it. She might not pick up any independents. If you look at the instant—and unscientific—Internet polls that appear on Drudge and some of the news sites, they are laughably partisan. Drudge an InstaPundit readers love Palin. MSNBC.com, home to Keith Olbermann, has Biden winning by ridiculous margins.
There's no doubt that McCain is in trouble. He's trailing in the polls, and some of that has got to be because Obama is viewed by voters as better on the economy and the way the House Republicans made him look bad on the bailout. It's going to take more than an amazing vice-presidential nominee to pull him out of that. She saved his campaign five weeks ago. It would be nice if she could do more interviews and perform well in them. But at the end of the day, it's still John McCain running for president. Let's at least say that if Obama beats McCain next month, it's because Barack's the better candidate, not because a hockey mom from Alaska brought down the GOP.
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Does it make any sense to say that as expected, Sarah Palin exceeded expectations? She didn't flail. She didn't lose her train of thought or all semblance of recognizable syntax. She powered through her answers, airy and bloated as some of them were. She snapped out of the stumped distress of her Couric interviews and turned back into the perky forceful governor who showed up at the Republican convention. What made the spell-breaking difference? She had more facts at her fingertips. She got to needle an opponent, which she clearly loves and does well. But the real magic, I think, is that she didn't have to answer a single follow-up question. God bless that format.
So Palin redeemed herself. But how much does it matter? Because Joe Biden was good. She knifed him in the ribs with a smile, with a wink here, a "darn right" there. And he came back with strength, emotion, and point-by-point substance. According to those mesmerizing green and orange lines on CNN that tracked reactions among undecided Ohio voters—men and women separated this time, instead of Republicans, Democrats, and independents—Biden's numbers spiked every time he talked about the economy and the Iraq war. Palin's didn't. It doesn't matter how many times she says "doggone it" if that reflects the wider sentiment of voters in the middle. Palin got her base back, if she'd ever lost it. But with JohnMcCain writing off Michigan today, that's not enough. How many people who didn't already agree with Palin did her restored charm win over?
What did you all think of Biden's tearing up, briefly, at the end? It worked for me: He was talking about the terrible car accident that killed his first wife and their baby daughter. He choked up in the midst of a powerful answer about how he understands what it's like to be a single parent and to worry deeply about one's family.
My favorite Palin moment: "The chant is 'Drill baby drill,' "she corrected Biden, who'd said, "drill drill drill," and for emphasis she gave a little shimmy. That's the effective blend of femininity and toughness that has made a lot of us waste a lot of time this fall watching her every move. Welcome back, Sarah Barracuda.
My favorite Biden moment: his deconstruction of Palin's much-repeated mantra that she and McCain are the mavericks in this race. Biden ripped her on the facts, citing all the votes McCain has cast with Bush.Then he ended with "maverick he is not." It had gravitas, it was on message, and as my colleague John Swansburg said, it felt cathartic.
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I think it’s fair to say that gender was just not an issue tonight. Biden didn’t get all weird about it. Palin didn’t, either. Also fair to say that both sides exceeded expectations. By a lot. Biden was as good as I have ever seen him. Palin was almost as good as she was at the convention. Here’s the difference: Biden was like Obama last week: a flatline. OK, maybe a flatline with tears, but, still, he didn’t modulate or escalate or hyperventilate. He just made his points—“a maverick he is not”—and stayed right on task. At his very best moments—talking about Cheney for instance—he was devastating. Whereas Palin was like McCain last week, reinventing herself on the fly. She toggled back and forth between Farmers Almanac Sarah (with the “gol-durnds,” and the “bless-yer-hearts,” and that wacky “diverse family”) and PowerPoint Sarah, who spoke in canned talking points, regardless of the question posed. As was the case with McCain last week, her rhetorical mood swings became ever more jarring as Biden stayed on message. Palin will get props tonight for holding her own. But I have to say I am less certain than ever of which Sarah Palin she was trying to hold onto.
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The most telling moment for me: Gwen Ifill asks both candidates to acknowledge their own worst flaws, their “Achilles' heels.” Biden jokingly thanks Ifill for suggesting that his worst flaw may be a lack of self-discipline before citing his “excessive passion” for the American people. A little disingenuous, to be sure, like the moment you tell a prospective boss that your only fault is working too hard. But Palin? She says nothing to address Ifill’s question in the entire 90 seconds of vaguely patriotic gobbledygook that follow (though somewhere in there Ronald Reagan makes an appearance, along with the shining city on the hill too, though, also). In other words, when directly asked to talk about any imperfections in her character or record, she ignores the question. Given George Bush’s well-established aversion to introspection, shouldn’t her handlers have coached her to have some kind of response prepared for this utterly foreseeable question? Or is obliviously high self-regard now considered a positive quality in a leader?
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We waited the whole night for her to mention Runner's World or mispronounce Ahmadinejad, and it didn't happen. The best we got was "nucular" and a few botched names. So, we have to admit that on the most important count she acquitted herself. Whether she won or lost the debate, she is no longer an embarrassment to the McCain campaign. Here are the few reasons I think she didn't mess up:
1. No follow-ups. All of her worst moments have come after an interviewer asked a follow-up question, even a gentle one: Can you name another Supreme Court case you disagree with? Can you name some specific media you read? Can you give an example of legislation where John McCain has broken with his party? In this debate, she got away with the 90 second speech, and no one asked for specifics.
2. Boring questions. Remember that early Clinton/Obama debate that Stephanopoulos moderated? He asked about all the juicy controversies: the flag pin, the Rev. Wright. Gwen Ifill took the PBS route. She asked a series of high-minded questions that Palin had clearly prepared for. Nothing about her personal life, her embarrassing gaffes, even the culture war standards (except for same-sex partners). She chose never to put anyone on the spot.
3. Biden ignored her. He basically pretended she wasn't there. He directed his answers to John McCain, or Gwen Ifill, but never engaged directly with SP. This allowed her to write her own script with little interruption.
4. Scripted folksiness. Palin has reigned in her combustible authenticity into a few digestible sound bites. She looks directly into the camera and says "a team of maaavericks" or "corruption and greed on Wall Street" or "predator lenders." This is a kind of phony authenticity that translates well on a national stage. The irony is, she now sounds like another Washington cliché—these days, who isn't a "Washingtonn outsider"? But to the "American people," this is a safe form of rebellion.
All night the TV pundits will debate whether she helped the ticket or only her own reputation. I would argue she helped the ticket, if only because it no longer seems scary to vote for them.
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Doggone it, howza 'bout we cancel these next two presidential debates and instead spend those evenings with Sen. O'Biden—Hey, can I call you Joe, too?—and Sarah Palin. Darn right that'd be more fun for Joe Sixpack—that's Mr. Sixpack to you—and for hockey moms across this great nation.
Gov. Palin made no rootin' tootin' sense tonight: Her defense of John McCain's insistence, as recently as two weeks ago, that the fundamentals of the economy were strong was this: "John McCain, in referring to the fundamental of our economy being strong, he was talking to and he was talking about the American work force and the American work force is the greatest in the world, with the ingenuity and the work ethic that is just entrenched in our work force. That's a positive, that's encouragement (wink) and that's what John McCain meant.''
Darned if she didn't answer Biden's charge that McCain had been all for financial deregulation with a big ol' non sequitur about tax cuts: "I'm still on the tax thing.'' Her comment that we have nothing to apologize for as a country was alarming, her tone condescending and her answer on global warming dyslexic: "I'm not one to attribute every activity of man to the change in the climate; there is something to be said for man's activity.'' The Bush phrase blame game -- -- which he popularized post-Katrina -- made a surprise cameo. And the capper might have been when she said "Never again'' in reference not to genocide, but predatory lending practices. Only, you know what? She killed, with her cozy, winking speed-walk around the questions. Oh, and Joe—that is his name, right?—did fine, too, both on the substance and in his demeanor.
When he choked up at the end, talking about the accident in which his first wife and daughter died and his two sons were critically injured, it was in direct response to Palin's suggestion that she has some pretty unique insight into what it's like for families who struggle financially and worry about doing right by their children. So when he said "the notion that somehow as a man I don't know what it's like to raise two kids alone...to have a child you're not sure is going to make it,'' it came across as real, rather than manipulative, while also (and perhaps for all time) trumping her gender card. It would have been nice if she'd found a way to acknowledge his loss, though she couldn't exactly walk over and throw her arms around him. And I doubt that's something they covered in debate prep.
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I'm no cosmetics expert—it's a high-maintenance day if I bother with mascara and face powder—but whoever did Palin's makeup should be fired. That contouring along her cheekbones made her look awful. During the debate, one Slate parent said his daughter noted, "Her face looks like a skull."
The makeup artist credited last year with improving Hillary Clinton's look is probably available.
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Palin was great—at long as she can stick to her script, which this format allowed. Will the vice presidency allow such confines? The presidency? Most important, does she have the knowledge base to be, as they say, a heartbeat away from presidency? She did not prove that because she didn't answer many questions with substance. So hopefully if she gets in the White House, she won't ever have to answer an impromptu question or go off script. Yeah, that seems likely.
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Palin started to disintegrate in the second half. She ran out of talking points and started to get plastic and incoherent on the subject of mavericks. Biden, meanwhile, started strong, briefly slumped a bit—some repetition and exasperation in the middle—but he came back strong. And it was rather moving when he choked up, talking about his first wife and daughter—killed in a car accident—and knowing what it was like to worry your child might not make it.
As far as the gender dynamics go here—I'd say Palin lost, but she lost not because she went all helpless and girly and speechless—she was confident, smooth, tough, etc. She just didn't say much of substance, and she ducked most of Ifill's questions. Biden, meanwhile, was occasionally repetitious and a little wonky, but on the whole he also defied expectations: He was calm, reasonably consise, not visibly patronizing ... and he's the one who cried. Huh.
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Palin recalls a moving moment: "I had a good conversation recently with Henry Kissinger ... and he shared with me his passion for diplomacy."
OMG, he must have really liked her.
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Oooh ... I am impressed. Palin cutely manages to turn her inability to answer Ifill's and Biden's questions into her advantage: She says (and I paraphrase, since this is from memory), "So I may not answer your questions, moderator or Joe, but that's because I am speaking instead to what the AMERICAN PEOPLE want to hear." Do not underestimate her ...
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But wouldn't it be better for all of us if Sarah Palin turned out not to be the third-rate bullshit artist she's been taken for? The main reason I'd take no pleasure in seeing her flail around tonight is that she could very well wind up in the Oval Office. So, I'd just as soon discover she's a woman of great depth and vision, too nuanced in her thinking and respectful of precedent to dismiss Supreme Court decisions on the fly.
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I agree it would be terrible if Sarah Palin, despite being an avid reader of newspapers, really couldn't name a single Supreme Court case besides Roe with which she disagreed.
But what if she's bluffing?
The woman vehemently criticizing Exxon v. Baker in this footage bares a striking resemblance to Palin and is, in fact, the Alaskan governor herself. So if Palin chokes tonight and garners pity from the audience, does that mean she's remarkably forgetful, an amnesiac, or, as the prevailing theory suggests, entirely conscious of her sympathy-vote potential?
Perhaps it is more likely that Palin is choosing not to mention this case to stay on message. In the case of Exxon v. Baker, Palin was pro-plaintiff and ran up against the Republican stance on trial lawyers and "frivolous lawsuits that threaten jobs across America." Either way, she seems to be better at manipulating her audience than we give her credit for. I'm beginning to think that win or lose tonight, Palin will still walk away the victor.
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On Monday, there was an outrage when Politico's Jonathan Martin reported that the Obama campaign was seeking a rape victim for an ad. Apparently, the campaign had contacted Kiersten Stewart (Martin misspelled her name as Steward) with the Family Violence Prevention Fund to help them find a victim for an ad relating to rape. According to the e-mail obtained by Politico, Stewart was unsure of the specifics regarding the ad.
At first, this made me queasy, too. A spokeswoman for rape? But then I thought about it. Why is this any different than using Gianna Jessen, an abortion survivor, to do an attack ad on Obama's position on the Born Alive Infant Protection Act in Illinois? Or using a POW who served with McCain to make an ad saying that he is unfit to lead?
Newsrooms have an ongoing debate about whether to name rape victims. The names are public record, but out of either respect or discomfort, newspapers decline to name them. But in the case of a political ad, the woman has a say in the matter. If the Obama campaign finds a woman to speak in its ad, she would have volunteered. If she wants to let herself be used this way, then who's to stop her? Many feminists have argued, after all, that shielding rape victims is misplaced chivalry and only compounds the shame.
The other difference here is that most of the testimonial ads are put out by independent groups, not by a political party or candidate. Jessen's ad was created by a group whose sole purpose is to reveal Obama's support of infanticide. No doubt this is something Jessen approves of—she's involved with the group. In Obama's case, he is asking a rape victim to talk about just one issue on his platform. Who knows if she supports all, or even most of, his positions. Planned Parenthood aired an ad today featuring a rape victim. There was no similar reaction. In Obama's case, the woman ends up speaking about rape but really serves as a spokesperson for Obama's campaign. In the Planned Parenthood situation, the woman talks about rape, but her speech doesn't have the same endorsement quality.
Obama's campaign wasn't wrong in seeking a rape victim for a political ad, but it does feel a little like exploitation. Then again, if she volunteered, no harm, no foul.
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Dana, I kind of agree with you but for different reasons: I don't have much sympathy for Palin, cringe as I might through those interviews at her ignorance on some major issues, simply because I don't think she shows much sympathy for other victims in her political views. I can never get past her providing no exception for victims of rape and incest in cases of abortion. A rape victim is supposed to bear the child of a violent crime against herself because she failed to fight hard enough to ward her aggressor off or get him to wear a condom? That's a pretty unsympathetic message to women, I think. And if Palin is going to live by that kind of sympathy sword, she does risk dying by it.
That said, I don't like to engage in too much schadenfreude because, well, I think it's uncharitable, and I believe it comes back to haunt you. It's partly why I've quelled my outrage at the McCain camp's nastiness—ever since the sneering, community organizer-mocking speeches of Guiliani and Palin at the GOP Convention, I've been dying to see the Democrats hit back as low below the belt as they were being punched—the jeering at helping laid-off people recoup their lives. (Call me a bleeding-heart liberal, but I think it rather mean-spirited to mock someone for trying to help people who'd lost their livelihoods, which is essentially everything. I bet none of those laughing had ever been laid off.) But they haven't as much as they could have, and I think it's actually paying off. Obama—at least currently—isn't the one imploding. There's still time left in this campaign; that all might change. But it's nice to see that taking a bit of the high road does actually turn out to pay off at times.
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Sarah,
It's been a heck of a month, hasn't it? When John McCain introduced you to the nation, I was immensely excited. You were great at the convention. You're a hit with the base. But I've got to fess up, you're making me uneasy.
It's not the easiest thing to admit. Liberal bloggers have spread falsehoods about you, and some in the media have been questioning you since Day 1. The vicious things people have said about you hit me personally for some reason, and I don't want to dignify them. But the interviews speak for themselves. I don't know what happened between the time you spoke at the convention and when you sat down with Charlie Gibson. But you've been like a different person.
My colleague Emily Bazelon has a thoughtful piece in Slate today about the agony women feel watching you. Conservative columnist Kathleen Parker wants to like you but thinks you should step down. I'm not going to go that far. At least not yet. (And if I did go that far, I'm not sure what I'd do, because you'd probably have to stumble through the alphabet before I'd want to vote for your opponent.)
I'm imploring you. Please bring your A-game tonight. I don't want you to do well just so you can ward off sympathy votes or pity parties. I want you to do well because there are many conservative women who support you or did support you but are wavering. We don't want feminism to be defined by the left, but if you fail, many are going to see it as a failure for all of us who share your ideology. We relate to you. And sure, whenever someone brings up the point that people want relatable candidates, someone fires back saying that we don't want "average joes" in office, we want someone exceptional. Well, what I think most people want is someone who is at once exceptional and likable. Someone who's talented and hardworking and successful but understands what it's like to fret over retirement funds and putting our kids through college. You've got that potential. God knows we've seen your relatable side. And you must have some exceptionalism in there. How else could you have gotten from the PTA to the governor's mansion?
Here are some tips and some things to keep in mind.
You're debating Sen. Joe Biden. In the past few weeks, he's asked a man in a wheelchair to stand up and reminisced about President FDR giving a televised speech in 1929. How hard can this be?
Everyone is making a huge deal out of the fact that you'd be "one heartbeat away from the presidency" if McCain wins. That's a lot of pressure. Well, Nancy Pelosi is two heartbeats away from the presidency, and if the bailout disaster in the House this week is any indication, she clearly doesn't let the pressure make her slow down and think too much.
I don't know what calms you down in times of stress, or if you have any tricks, like picturing the audience in their underwear. But if you need to, imagine that Gwen Ifill is Sean Hannity. Pretend that Joe Biden is former Gov. Tony Knowles. Do whatever you have to. Some of us are still pulling for you.
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Damn, man, whatever happened to Schadenfreude? Isn’t anyone here going to enjoy seeing Sarah Palin struggle tonight? God knows I can identify with the sympathy angle—I once gave a job talk at Brown that felt, from my end, a lot like that Katie Couric interview – but in no way does that translate into hoping she does well enough to redeem herself in the debate, in order to somehow represent on behalf of women in general. On the contrary: I’m looking forward to watching Palin flail (and come on, people, in an unscripted and explicitly polemical format she’s going to flail like an Alaska salmon on the dock.) To me, watching her incompetence get exposed is like payback for the last eight years of staring at a naked, and thoroughly unattractive, emperor. And you know what? I was a lot more qualified for that Brown job than Palin is for VP, but I still wasn’t the best candidate, and my prospective employers deserved to find that out.
I think both compassionate people like the rest of you and spiteful harpies like myself can agree that cutting Palin extra slack – whether because of her gender or her supposed persecution at the hands of “the press” – is a profoundly unfeminist thing to do. And while I agree that strategically, Biden will be wise to tiptoe around Palin’s gender (avoiding the appearance of condescension, etc.), I look forward to a brave post-feminist world in which, one day, the debate partners of lightweights like Palin will be at liberty to mop the floor with said lightweights—not because they’re women (or men), but because they’re arrogant fools.
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Dahlia, if Palin tanks tonight, then I think you're right. She won't cash in the victim card at the ballot box. But in the more likely event that she exceeds ever-falling expectations, then she gets the benefit both of Hanna's deserving-of-sympathy image and comeback kid redemption. Isn't that the persona we tend to love best--perky candidate/boxer with gumption who looks like she's down for the count, then pulls it out? A much better end to the Palin Lifetime series. And enough to shore up those sliding poll numbers?
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Hanna, your nightmare is my nightmare but not because I fear it will affect the outcome of the election. I fear for what it says about the power of playing the victim, and how far we can push it before we’ve lost more than we have gained.
Of course Sarah Palin will play the victim card tonight. Best as I can tell, it’s the only card she’s played since her name was announced: The perky victim, relentlessly cheerful in the face of conspiracies too numerous to name. So let’s stipulate that going into the debates Palin is already the victim of “media elites” and the “Washington establishment.” She is a victim of the bloodthirsty Alaska legislature. She is a victim of a media pile-on, resulting in her near media blackout, while simultaneously (if mysteriously) being a victim of media “censorship.” Palin enters tonight’s debate a victim of sexism; elitism; gotcha-ism; small-town-ism. And well in advance of the debate she is also a victim of Gwen Ifill’s in-the-tank-ism.
But even if you and Emily and Judith Warner are right that nobody with an ounce of compassion can enjoy witnessing Palin’s public embarrassment, I can’t see how that translates into votes. Even if it’s true that “the image of Palin as victim, deserving of sympathy, will emerge clearly before the nation tonight,” I’m not sure that means much more than a lot of Americans who will vote for Obama while feeling really bad for Sarah Palin. I don’t know that in light of the serious crises voters are facing, pity will achieve more for Gov. Palin than just pity. Maybe I am misreading the lesson of all the women who were galvanized by the attacks on Hillary Clinton. But while I think sympathy for the sexism with which Clinton was treated represented some of that support, most of those women also saw her as the best possible candidate for office, being cruelly held back for her gender. New polls show that Palin is widely seen as too inexperienced to be taken seriously and apparently women agree with that assessment. They seem to increasingly find it hard to attribute Palin’s collapse to gender alone or to rally behind her for that reason. Americans are feeling badly victimized right now and I’m not sure that this will lead them to rally behind another victim. They will buy Palin’s memoir. They will watch her movie once it’s turned into a Lifetime miniseries. They—and we—will admire her political skills. But will they put her in Dick Cheney’s chair because she’s been treated badly? God I hope not.
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Kathleen Parker says her fellow conservative Sarah Palin has exhausted her cringe reflex, and I hear her on that. Mine has been overtaxed for years. Remember the presidential debate for which some malevolent (or high, maybe?) makeup artist painted Al Gore orange? In the privacy of my living room, I listened to most of that one with my sweatshirt pulled up over my eyes because it was too painful to watch. At the first presidential debate in '04, in Miami, I even had to look away from George W., about whom I am not aware of ever having had an admiring thought, because watching him flounder around babbling that being president, well, "it's hard work ... it's hard work ... it's hard work'' just felt cruel. So am I hoping that both Palin and Joe Biden do well enough tonight that I won't have to avert my eyes? No, because my comfort level isn't the point; their competence is. No, because even the most lopsided debate can help the perceived loser more than the supposed winner; there are no straight lines between cause and effect in politics, which I have to admit is part of the attraction, warped as that may be. No, because women have the same right to be underprepared that men have always had. And no, because voters make me even more nervous than candidates do, so whatever happens tonight is still just the prelims.
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... about tonight's debate, and it looks like this. Emily, after reading about your efforts to tamp down the sisterly sympathy for Palin, and then reading about Judith Warner's sudden wave of affection for her ("I saw a woman fully aware that she was out of her league, scared out of her wits, hanging on for dear life"), it came to me clearly. One month ago, Palin sank her teeth into the national scene. She gave a speech that electrified some and terrified others. She was bold and sexy and took on enemies without anyone's help. Women could love her or love to hate her but the furthest thing from their minds was pity.
Now, slowly, slowly, they have sapped her mojo. Who is they? Charlie Gibson, Barack Obama, Katie Couric, us, the president of Harvard, Stephen Breyer—the whole cabal. Joe Biden might behave perfectly tonight—reign in his babalicious comments, his condescension, his pomposity, follow all the Dahlia rules—and still he won't prevent this new image of Palin forming: the new girl who is trying her best but stumbling and then getting mercilessly teased. After all, anyone who does not torture kittens for fun can not help but feel sorry for Palin as she fails to answer the question about other Supreme Court decisions she disagrees with—truly one of the most painful few seconds of television ever.
Even Couric tried to keep her voice as gentle as possible in the follow up—"Can you think of any?" she purred. But still, the new Couric is not so popular. The Couric people—and especially women—adored is the old one, the one who would have defended a woman who had dared to take on the villains of her small town and then been robbed of her glory. Who cares if her favorite philosopher is a columnist from Runner's World? Who cares if she ditched one of her colleges because it was raining too much? The bottom line in the wide world of ex-Couric and Oprah voters is, she's one of the sisters, and she needs our help.
I realize none of my worries are borne out by the poll numbers. The Palin effect has faded, McCain is down in the polls, etc. But images take a while to jell. And my fear is, the image of Palin as victim, deserving of sympathy, will emerge clearly before the nation tonight.
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A lot of liberal bloggers are crowing this morning about Sarah Palin's concession to Katie Couric that the Constitution protects a right to privacy. I don't think that's nearly the monster gotcha they seem to believe. Couric asked "Do you think there's an inherent right to privacy in the Constitution?" Palin responded "I do." Chief Justice John Roberts, at his confirmation hearings, also agreed that the constitution protects a right to privacy. So did Justice Samuel Alito. (And in strikingly similar language!!!) What Palin said to Couric is hardly a dramatic departure from that line. Nor does it open the door to any kind of wobbliness on choice (see also, Roberts and Alito). That said, I can't agree with Ann Althouse that Palin handled the court questions with any real degree of skill. I found the segment to be yet another painful instance of the Palin method-acting approach to interviews: rote repetition of blurry talking points, fused with blurry confusion over issues to which she has not given any kind of serious thought. Nevertheless, I don't expect Palin to collapse in a verbless heap at tonight's debate the way she has done for Couric. The McCain campaign has already set up moderator Gwen Ifill as a "hater." So long as Palin can keep her cue cards straight and twinkle intermittently on cue, she'll likely battle Joe Biden to a draw.
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Slate editors and XX Factor bloggers Emily Bazelon and Dahlia Lithwick will be chatting on Washingtonpost.com this afternoon at 3:30 ET. They will be outlining what Joe Biden and Sarah Palin each need to do to succeed in tonight's vice-presidential debate.
Emily has an article in Slate today that discusses how watching Palin's interviews is agonizing for women. Dahlia has written about how Joe Biden can debate Palin and win.
Send them your questions about tonight's debate.
Update, 5:21 p.m.: Here's the transcript. Thanks for your questions!
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Sarah Palin striking out on Supreme Court cases she doesn't like, other than the old faithful Roe v. Wade, is painful television. Joe Biden's answers to the same set of questions from Katie Couric seemed odd for a different reason. Biden said he supports Roe, “Because I think it’s as close to a consensus that can exist in a society as heterogeneous as ours.” Call Roe brave if you want, call it essential for women, call it a victory for equal rights—but a consensus? Given how divisive abortion politics have proved to be, that seems like wishful bordering on magical thinking. Biden defends the trimester-by-trimester structure of Roe, pointing out that it allows for progressively more government regulation. And he ends on, "not consensus, but as close as it's going to get." That's a little better, I guess.
I give Biden points for panning the Supreme Court's 2000 decision to strike down part of the Violence Against Women Act. Biden acknowledges that he wrote the law and had a personal interest in the ruling. It does stand as an unfortunate high water mark of the court's federalist revolt. Which has since lost its moxie.