Wednesday, September 10, 2008 - Posts
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Amen Rosa. But I can’t help but think that every moment we spend talking about a vice presidential candidate who refuses to talk to us is a moment in which we fall into the trap of Palinography – the cult of obsessively telling and retelling Palin’s story in lieu of discussing anything that matters. A frequent Slate contributor emailed today asking what would happen if everyone here just agreed not to mention Sarah Palin again until she says or does something worth covering. Would traffic plummet? Or would readers agree that after 13 days of media navel-gazing (to which I have massively overcontributed, by the way) about whether and when and how we might talk about a (gasp!) female political candidate who can’t be bothered to talk to us is really quite enough?
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And she's still Sarah Palin.
Which is to say: She still opposes abortion even in cases of rape and incest but as governor cut funding for groups providing support to teen mothers. She still thinks it's OK to pretend she's always been a foe of earmarks and the famed "bridge to nowhere," though she liked both until it became convenient to dislike them. She still favors teaching creationism in the schools. She still doesn't think that global warming has anything to do with human activity. She's still confused about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. She's still someone who, until recently, hadn't "really focused much on the war in Iraq." (Though before the McCain campaign handed her a new script in late August, she, like most Americans, worried about "not knowing what the plan is to ever end the war we are engaged in.") She's still under investigation by an Alaska state ethics committee for misusing her official position to push for the firing of a state trooper who had divorced her sister (and she seems to have thought it was OK to trash her former brother-in-law in front of his child, to the point where an Alaska judge warned that such disparagement of a parent was "emotional child abuse.") She still took a state travel per diem during days she stayed in her own home. She still flirted for years with the Alaska Independence Party, a group with creepy links to Southern secessionist groups (and a group with a founder, Joe Vogler, whose anti-American comments leave Rev. Jeremiah Wright in the dust: "The fires of hell are frozen glaciers compared to my hatred for the American government. ... And I won't be buried under their damn flag.")
Oh, right, and her major qualification to be a heartbeat away from the presidency is still her two terms as mayor of a town smaller than many U.S. high schools, followed by 18 months as governor of a state with a population smaller than that of Memphis.
So let's not get distracted by swine fever.
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So Sarah Palin's oldest son, Track, was mainlining OxyContin, reports the National Enquirer, and ingesting many other illegal substances. His tour of duty was meant to get him away from all the partying, according to a string of anonymous friends. Some national hero. If Sarah Palin were anyone else, conservatives would be saying the obvious: pregnant teenage daughter, coke-sniffing son—well, what do you expect, when their mother works so much?
Actually, the Palin family is a psychological study in the impermeability of information. When someone has so deeply penetrated the national psyche, even our dreams, as my own husband confesses, no amount of fact-finding will change our impressions. Affairs, incest, dead grandmother in the closet. You get the impression it won't make a whit of difference. For some large portion of white women (including, apparently, Camille Paglia), Sarah Palin is the next American folk hero. It's like trying to truth-squad Daniel Boone. Who cares about the details?
One of my many depressed Obama-supporting friends suggests a tidy solution: Repeal the 19th Amendment.
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Just to clarify my post from last night that brought attention to Obama's "lipstick on a pig" comment, I was merely pointing out that Obama said something silly and might come to regret it. Which he probably is today, because, as John Dickerson pointed out, he's spending today dealing with it, one more day he's not getting his own message out. I think it's obvious he didn't do it intentionally—if he did, he's not as smart as I've always thought he was—and, to answer your question, Dana, I don't find the phrase even remotely sexist.
He made a gaffe, as all politicians are prone to do, and here's why: Less than a week ago, Sarah Palin stood before the nation and called herself a pit bull in lipstick. It was the signature line in her speech, and it's now part of her identity. So when Obama stood up on that stage and said that McCain and Palin's call for change was "just calling the same thing something different. But you know you can't, you know you can put lipstick on a pig, it's still a pig"—well, the only thing people heard was "lipstick."
So, like Mike Huckabee, I'm going to give Obama a pass on the grounds that it wasn't intentional. At the same time, I don't blame the McCain camp for taking advantage of it, though I do wish they had toned down the outrage just a wee bit.
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I agree with John Dickerson about the silliness of the McCain campaign getting all outraged over Obama's alleged "sexism." Their ticket is of a warrior and frontierswoman. They undercut their own case with their quickie video whining that Sarah Palin is a victim, of all things. But I'd be more willing to buy Obama's surprise as to how his lipstick remark was taken (and it was clear the crowd heard it as a Palin reference) if he hadn't also referred to McCain's ideas as "old fish" wrapped in paper. Surely Obama understands the use and misuse of coded language.
Aside from lipstick, there are two stories on Drudge today that may help explain why Democrats have such a hard time winning the White House. One is about an international poll showing the rest of the world is rooting for Obama to win. The other is about an international poll showing much of the rest of this same world believes either the United States or Israel were the perpetrators of the attacks of Sept.11. It is understandable that many Americans don't care that much about the good opinion of a world that thinks we attacked ourselves, and they worry how a "citizen of the world" would respond if we were attacked again.
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Family values are in the news again today, but this time it's the Democrats who are taking the heat. McCain's latest ad attacks Obama on the subject of sex ed, misstating the senator's voting record in the process. Over nursery school music, viewers are told that Obama is "wrong for [their] family" on the grounds that he wants kids to learn about sex before they learn how to read.
I've stated here before that I think sex should be introduced early and often to the elementary school curriculum. Mine's an opinion many people disagree with, and Barack Obama happens to be one of them.
Obama himself has said, "Nobody's suggesting that kindergartners are going to be getting information about sex in the way that we think about it." What he did support (in 2003) was a bill in the Illinois state legislature that would have introduced "instruction on the prevention of sexually transmitted infections, including the prevention, transmission and spread of HIV" to pre-existing programs.
Yes, Mitt Romney, I do think there's a sex ed curriculum that's appropriate for 5-year-olds, and it has more to do with protecting them from other people's misguided actions than from their own. The only sex ed current students even have a chance of seeing before middle school is the kind that limits itself to a discussion of acceptable body language, peer respect, and personal space or "inappropriate touching," as Obama's own campaign once referred to it.
And for the record, child literacy has nothing to do with children's ability to handle sex ed, unless you consider that, as they learn to read, children become more aware and more likely to process conflicting or inaccurate messages about sex. If McCain is truly concerned that kids learn to read before learning about sex, maybe he should stick to the topic at hand (education reform) and refocus his efforts on improving early reading skills.
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I'm trying to get work done on something else—a piece of writing and thinking not related to the Alaskan body-snatcher who seems to have invaded our collective brain—but my mind keeps returning to the trivial campaign flap of the day, this flurry of feigned outrage about "lipstick on a pig." Rachael's right that the Obama campaign's unfortunate choice of this phrase to describe the cynical repackaging of John McCain's economic plan opens the Dems up to charges of sexism. But I honestly can't decide: Is the use of the phrase, even if it does include a veiled jab at Palin, really sexist? After all, this is a woman who, in a much-praised convention speech (now being endlessly repeated on the stump) referred to herself as a "pit bull with lipstick." Isn't Obama's repurposing of a related metaphor just pointing out that, beneath that lipstick, the emperor's pit bull has no clothes?
As is being widely blogged today, McCain used the same figure of speech to deride Hillary's health care plan back in May. (The Christian Science Monitor reports that Dick Cheney also used it to demean Kerry's war record in 2004, and that Obama used it earlier in the campaign to criticize Bush's Iraq policy.) As far as I can recall, the Clinton campaign, which was never slow to seize upon opportunities for umbrage, let the phrase pass unnoticed (if anyone has a clip to refute that claim, please send along). Then again, McCain did preface his comparison with the sentence "I don't like to use this term." Why not? What would his disclaimer mean, if not that the phrase was somehow offensive to Hillary?
Pigs and pit bulls: two animals popularly considered to be unpleasant (though both can actually make smart and loving pets!), both repackaged with a slapped-on coat of Revlon (personally, I like Cherries in the Glow). The difference, of course, is that the pit-bull joke puts an admirable spin on the image of the dolled-up beast: Pit bulls are to be admired for their toughness and tenacity (and lipstick only makes them cuter!) while a pig is just a pig, cosmetics or no. What do the rest of you XX-ers think: If the Hillary campaign had cried sexism over the same porcine imagery, would you have given it more or less credence? And would you rather compare yourself to a dog, or have someone else compare your ideas to a pig?
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