Tuesday, September 02, 2008 - Posts
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The Palin nomination may be politically suicidal in the long term, but it's culturally canny in the short term. It's galvanized McCain's base while making the liberal media's assumptions about the cultural wars look more muddled than ever.
I haven't posted yet about Sarah Palin because I can't separate her appointment from the media's reaction to it. As Dahlia said, there was a Lifetime movie marathon quality to the coverage this weekend of Palin and her many "dramas," of which
Bristol's pregnancy is only the most recent (and most spectacular?) iteration. The Lifetime coverage reached an apogee this morning with the publication of a New York Times front-page story about whether Palin should be running for VP given that she has a young Down syndrome baby. According to the Times, Palin's appointment has "set off a fierce argument among women about whether there are enough hours in the day for her to take on the vice presidency, and whether she is right to." Only, the article's authors posit, the usual culture-war divide has been reversed, with stay-at-home moms defending Palin and working mothers condemning her. I'm sure this is, in part, true. But this "reversal" seems to me less a "surprising" new twist in the culture wars than a gritty reflection of the reality of life for women today: The categories aren't as tidy as they're made out to be. Life in America isn't simply "red" or "blue" but something in between, rife with contradiction and complication. Palin's position on abortion is hardly feminist, but her choice to get back to work three days after giving birth might well please old hard-liners like Shulamith Firestone.
It's a reminder that the Mommy Wars debates are largely had by people who can afford to spend a lot of time theorizing in op-ed columns rather than trying to put gas in the car and food on the table. Feminist liberal moms sometimes choose to stay home while evangelical moms sometimes have to work; they may not want to, but a study I once wrote about suggested they feel less unhappiness about finding a "work-life" balance than their feminist peers do. It's a psychological truism that people who judge you are really reflecting something of their own anxieties. Why else, in the supposed age of gender equality, do we respond with the same old Pavlovian frenzy when the mommy-isn't-at-home bell is rung instead of stepping back to ask: How can we change our culture so this is a decision that falls equally to mom and dad? How come feminist-minded journalists don't take male politicians to task for how they run their lives but get in at arms when a conservative mother chooses to run for national office? As Anne pointed out, isn't this ironic? Whatever the problems I have with Palin’s politics, her decision to run for VP as a mom with a young kid is not one of them.
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