Friday, October 24, 2008 - Posts
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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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