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Wow, Palin is a pit bull with lipstick. Her speech was good with some killer lines—the one about "We tend to prefer candidates who don't talk about you one way in Scranton and another way in San Francisco" (or vice versa, I'm paraphrasing) will be hard to refute.
What struck me most, however, is how much the pitbull theme extended to the entire night: The whole tenor of the evening was more mean-spirited than any convention I can remember. The crowd laughed at the mention of Obama being a community organizer during Giuliani's speech—what I think was not supposed to be a joke but rather a throwaway credit—but I'm sure all those laid-off steelworkers that Obama was working with to rebuild their lives wouldn't think it was funny. "Proud steelworkers," as Palin pointed out that her husband was. It's pretty mean to laugh at someone trying to help those with the true misfortune of a layoff; it seems cruel and unusual that those they were laughing at are professional kin of Palin's husband.
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Before the speech we were talking about how we would be judging Sarah Palin on the rather simple task of speaking someone else's words. But she transcended that. She brought an X factor (an XX factor?) that announced someone formidable had arrived. It's ironic that she was so effective in diminishing both Obama's record and his speechmaking, because her record is also thin and she turns out to be just as effective a speaker in her own way. Think of the week she's been through—she and her family have been made into a national joke—and yet she commanded the stage with steel and confidence. I thought it was very smart for her to use her knowledge of energy to take a tour of the world's hot spots as a way of saying she's capable of grasping more than parochial issues. And she delivered the Republican argument against Obama—he's written two memoirs but no major legislation—with brio, not a bludgeon. After this she will have to speak her own words in unscripted settings. But tonight was a knockout debut just like Barack Obama's at the 2004 Democratic Convention.
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Sarah Palin loved being onstage, and people loved watching her love it. This was no Sarah, plain and tall. There was a palpable eros in the room at the RNC tonight, and not just when she made a subtle crack about the great "package" her union husband had offered her. To be clear: What made Palin appealing wasn't that she was pretty in a beauty-contest kind of way, but that she possessed a real charge as she spoke, a charge that derived from her palpable sense of enjoyment at finding her voice and being loved for it. She started off rocky, speaking in a high pitch. But as soon as she mentioned that she had a son going to Iraq, the shell cracked; she appeared to relax into her role, pursing her lips and having fun. What Hillary Clinton pretended to be at the end of her campaign, Sarah Palin is: a red-blooded Middle American populist. Or so you started thinking by the end of her speech. No wonder John McCain wanted to get onstage while she stood on it; it won't be long before Sarah Palin has her own equivalent of the Obama girl.
Nor is it any accident, I think, that Palin found her voice, as it were, when she got into her spiel about motherhood. Palin did something I've always thought female politicians should make more use of: She used her authority as a mother—the vital center of many families, and the first authority figure many of us know—to coax Americans into seeing her as a "force to be reckoned with," as CNN kept putting it. While her platform may be undeveloped, her persona is not. It's actually more complex than we're used to seeing onstage: a combination of eros with tough love, motherhood with wifeliness, fierceness with friendliness. It's not a tack Hillary tried. Throughout, Palin made full use of the old power women had (as the domestic angel) while embracing fully the new power women want (as the boardroom madam). Ironically, she may have an easier time bringing what CNN called "toughness and femininity" together precisely because she never assumed at the outset of her adult life that she'd end up in a role like this. On-screen, at least, she's not divided in herself in quite the way that someone who agonizes over how to "balance" her life can seem. In the end, the night held two firsts: the sight of a VP candidate onstage quipping about foreign policy while her husband held the baby in the audience. And the glimpse of a novel problem for a presidential candidate: sexual tension with his VP.
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Why shouldn't a smart, gutsy hockey mom turned small-town mayor potentially run the United States? The McCain campaign has argued that attacks on Sarah Palin's lack of experience are sexism rather than legitimate inquiries; Palin took it one step further tonight by asserting that her service as mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, and its 9,000 souls is exactly the right credential, and that the U.S. Senate is the suspect line on a résumé. This should seem odd, since being a senator is John McCain's main qualification. But that's the sort of contradiction Palin simply strides past, chin ever up. The troubles of her kids are off limits, until there they are up onstage, to be celebrated. Bristol holds hands with her now-fiance Levi, the crowd goes wild for the whole clan, and "What a beautiful family," John McCain can say when he walks out onstage to greet them. The Sarah Palin Show is all about gumption and the right optics. Even McCain's awkward grin registers as a plus with Palin near to stand tall and personify true grit, as only a tough mom can. The Republicans even invoke Hillary as a sage for seeing through Obama during the primaries. And her advisers help them along by backing up some of the charges that the scrutiny of Palin amounts to sexism. It's as if the McCain campaign tossed a whole deck of gender cards into the air and turned them into confetti.
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Maureen, I suppose whether or not you find the Republican stance on abortion hypocritical depends on point of view. From a pro-choice perspective, yes, a commitment to banning abortion is government intrusion on a woman's body. If you look at it from the perspective of the unborn child, the platform stance is an attempt to recognize the sanctity of life for everyone, born or unborn.
Republicans, as a party, are not trying to ban birth control. (Yeah, I know there are some extremists out there. I don't like ‘em, either.) And I will defend to the death a woman's right not to have sex. But biology sucks. Blame God if you're religious; otherwise blame Mother Nature or evolution. Women have babies. Men don't. We trash our girlish figures and lose hours of sleep on those 2 a.m. feedings. It's not fair. Aside from birth control and abortion, there's no getting around it. Birth control prevents the creation of a life, but if you're pro-life, you believe that abortion ends one.
When Republicans say they don't want government intruding in their lives, it's because we trust people to make decisions that are sound for them, we trust people to take care of themselves. But when you're pregnant, you're not making decisions just for yourself. You're making them for another person. And believe me, I don't buy the load of crap that South Dakota is selling, that a woman who gets an abortion is terminating a "whole, separate, unique, living human being." No other "unique" person has ever made my back ache or caused my ankles to swell to elephantine proportions. At the same time, that "clump of cells" isn't going to turn into a watermelon, or a puppy, or a ficus tree. It's a human being.
Almost everyone, regardless of ideology, accepts some form of government regulation in their lives, largely in the name of protecting us. We accept speed limits and drunk-driving laws to keep us safe on the roads; we trust building codes to keep us safe in our homes and public places; etc. If, at the end of the day, a platform that respects the life of the unborn still represents a hypocrisy, well, then call me a hypocrite. It's a charge I can live with.
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To expand on your point further, E.J., that outlawing abortion is also coercive, I've got a question for the GOP party faithful that I've been chewing over since I saw a Minnesota politician (I don't remember her name, but she was wearing a lovely light-yellow sleeveless dress) at the GOP Convention extolling the virtues of keeping government out of our lives. How is being pro-life and anti-government interference not wanting to have your cake and eat every crumb? It's a combo that's always seemed wildly inconsistent to me, and I was reminded of it every time this pol mentioned that "the government has no place in our private decision-making" (I paraphrase), receiving thunderous applause each time. I kept thinking of the pro-life part of the GOP platform, which to me is very much in my life and private decision-making since, in E.J.'s words, "it forces a woman to carry to term, whether she wants to or not."
I think that each side of the pro-life/pro-choice debate needs to concede that its preferred plan has limitations, and I'm sure that the Democrats have similar contradictions in their platform (which I'm also sure will be brought promptly to my attention). But wanting the government out of every facet of our lives, yet also wanting to mandate legally (by repealing Roe v. Wade) that no woman can ever get an abortion? You can't have it both ways.
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A guest post from XX reader, Nicole Beckton:
In thinking about Sarah Palin's first big national evening, I realized that one of the "benefits" of McCain's pick is his total control of—if not her image, that's now impossible—her policies, her ideas, all of her political substance. Because of Palin’s perceived lack of interest/indifference to serious foreign policy concerns and limited record of opinions on such matters, she is a dream pick for McCain because, unlike Joe Biden, who has thought substantively about global and domestic concerns for decades, Sarah Palin is a relative blank slate.
Palin is an ultra-conservative who seems likely (because of her lack of experience) to pretty much accept anything the McCain campaign tells her to think about foreign and domestic policy. In fact what she has been asked to do, in preparation for this evening, is to simply parrot McCain on every ideological and policy level: To not have a mind of her own, to not have come to her opinions on our most pressing problems through careful thought, reflection, analysis, or legislative action. She is clearly willing to do so. That’s why Lindsey Graham raves that “she's smart and she will learn over time.” That’s why McCain advisers have said that part of her appeals for him was that “he felt she would be able to be educated quickly.”
Palin is thus the attractive new face of neo-conservativism with no recorded policy thoughts of her own. As a woman, this is more insulting to me than the fact that they barely vetted her—although I'm disturbed by that too! I think they vetted her just enough to know they could control her big policy positions ... unlike Kay Bailey Hutchinson, Olympia Snowe, Meg Whitman, and other more qualified female GOP leaders. Simply put, it feels like they picked a woman with no record or opinion on tough FOREIGN POLICY positions ... but with extremely strong views on DOMESTIC social issues—all of which seems to me to say, she's being kept in her place.
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Linda's piece on Slate yesterday notes that the statistics on teen pregnancy show a grim reality for girls in Bristol Palin's situation. The numbers on teen marriage don't look much better. A 2001 study found:
If the wife was a teenager at first marriage, the marriage is much more likely to dissolve than if the wife was at least 20 years of age at marriage. ... After 10 years of marriage, 48 percent of marriages of women under age 18 years at marriage have disrupted compared with 40 percent of marriages of women who were 18-19 years of age at marriage, 29 percent of marriages of women who were 20-24 years of age at marriage, and 24 percent of marriages of women at least 25 years of age at marriage.
So will those wedding bells ring when Bristol's 17 or 18? It might make a difference. Of course, quickie marriages can work—see Rachael's parents' story below.
But how's this for unfair? We're discussing the odds that someone in Bristol's circumstances will end up broke, uneducated, and divorced, while everyone's drooling over her boyfriend. A New York blogger calls him "sex on skates." The New York Daily News rhapsodizes about "the handsome teen with a light dusting of whiskers on his chin—his dark brown hair curly and wet," calling him "ruggedly handsome" and "broad-chested." I guess I'm the only one who can't get past his almost-mullet.
Update: The almost-mullet is gone! The McCain-Palin campaign must have made Levi get a haircut before letting him on the plane to Minnesota.
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Rachael,
Thank you for the moving story about your origins. Your parents rock! I just want to point out, though, that when your mothers' relatives were trying to coerce your mother into an abortion, they were trying to overrule her choice. Outlawing abortion is similarly coercive, since it forces a woman to carry to term, whether she wants to or not. Either one is the opposite of choice.
In unrelated news, when I broke things off with a woman I was dating last year—the first woman I'd mentioned to my family after I left my partner of 19 years—my father was very disappointed. He had metastatic cancer and wanted to see me settled with someone before he died. (Sorry, dad.) But he took a deep breath and said, "Well, just because you're pregnant doesn't mean you have to get married."
The joke was on him. I'm pretty sure I'm too old to get pregnant.
EJ
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Linda Hirshman has a thoughtful piece in Slate reacting to Bristol Palin's pregnancy and pointing out that no, no one wants their 17-year-old daughter to get pregnant. The odds are stacked against teen mothers, no doubt. But so many stories I read on this topic present those scary numbers, add a brief caveat that "of course there are exceptions, but" and go on to rail against pro-lifers for wanting to overturn Roe v. Wade.
If you'll indulge me for a few minutes, I'd like to hit "pause" and tell you about one of those exceptions. My mom got pregnant when she was 16. With me. Thankfully, it was 1972, before Roe, or we might not be having this conversation. Well, the rest of you would be. She and my dad had to get married in the little side chapel of their church, not at the grander main altar, because of her "condition." Before they even got that far, a few of my mom's cousins called a family meeting and decided my mom had to have an abortion lest she embarrass the family. I guess you'd call them pro-choice.
My mom finished high school a year early so she wouldn't have to juggle a baby and classes. She and my dad lived in a tiny apartment, and saved up to buy a modest house when I was 6 months old. (My first car cost more than that house.) My dad worked five days a week at one job, and on one of his days off, he'd work at my grandfather's clothing store to make the $17 they needed for the weekly grocery bill.
Eventually, my parents bought their own business, a mom-and-pop grocery store. It didn't make them millionaires, and it required a lot of blood, sweat, and tears, but they worked side-by-side for more than 20 years. They still found time to haul us to swimming practice and baseball practice and come to our games and help us with our homework. And they did well enough to put two kids through college, set aside a nest egg for retirement, and start college funds for their ever-expanding brood of grandchildren. More than 35 years later, they're still happily married.
Yes, my parents were an exception, very clearly. But today is not the 1960s or 1970s, either. Young women have vastly more opportunities in high school for sports and other activities that keep them busy and improve their self-esteem. Birth control is more readily available. For girls who do get pregnant, schools—both high schools and college—have more programs to help moms get their educations and support themselves and their children. Let's empower our daughters to make the right choices for themselves, to either avoid sex when they're not ready or use birth control when they do. And if all else fails, love them and support them and, if you're running for vice president and the world is going to find out, stand up and tell the world you're proud of them. Yes, it takes hard work, and it takes sacrifice. Are we not raising our kids—daughters and sons—to work hard, to put the needs of others ahead of their own when the situation calls for it?
Whenever we have conversations about Roe v. Wade, pro-choicers always point to how awful life is for women who keep their babies, how hard it is. Hirshman decries the Republican position on abortion as "cruel." But can't we please acknowledge that there are victims, and that the pro-choice position has its own brutal cruelty? Does anyone consider how many worthwhile lives are sacrificed? Is it worse to grow up poor or not at all? My own life is pretty damn important to me, and I'm thankful every day that I'm here.
So, while everyone else is snickering and making jokes about shotgun weddings, I'd like to wish Bristol Palin, her boyfriend Levi, and their child the best. It's not an easy job you have before you, but the rewards can be amazing.
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It was striking to see Laura Bush onstage last night after watching Hillary Clinton and Michelle Obama speak last week. Laura looked stiff and uncomfortable, despite her smiles; she swiveled her head almost robotically toward and away from the camera, and her eyes had the tight look of someone disconnected from what she was saying. A few weeks ago I was at a dinner party with some people from Texas who used to know Laura Bush pretty well—and who had liked her. They invoked the usual things people invoke when they talk about who the private Laura Bush once was: a funny, smart jazz lover. A sometime smoker who cared a lot about education. And they said the question all her friends kept asking was: How can she stand by and watch as her husband makes so many bad decisions?
Curtis Sittenfeld's newly released American Wife, a novel about a woman named Alice Blackwell, aims to answer that exact question. Alice is based loosely on Laura Bush. She's a shy, bookish girl from Wisconsin who grows up to be the wife of a jokey born-again former alcoholic who runs for president only to launch a deeply unpopular war. American Wife didn't go very far, in my view, toward dramatizing the inner life of this woman. But it does make you think quite a lot about the peculiarity of being a first lady—an inherently passive role that is both simpler and more complicated than being Sarah Palin or Hillary Clinton-as-candidate. In the book, Alice asks herself, "If I believed I could have made a difference but instead remained silent, then how could I bear it?" Choosing silence at a moment when more and more women are choosing to find their voice on the political stage—and to some degree just succeeding in finding it—must have a special poignancy. Or maybe it's a special kind of complicity. The book did make me wonder what, in her case, I would do. On the one hand, I believe a marriage is a private space; on the other, I wouldn't be able to swallow my own feelings in order to "support" my husband without question in the public eye. I'm curious to know what other XXers think—are you sympathetic to Laura or not? Will the role of first spouse change over time, as more couples with "new marriages" take residency in the White House?
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A guest post from Slate's and The Big Money's Jim Ledbetter:
The Sarah Palin narrative is incomplete and will likely remain so even after her speech tonight. Nonetheless, I perceive a nagging gap between the way the media is so far discussing her candidacy and the way that polls indicate it is being received. Palin IS interesting to women and even appealing; as "XX Factor" noted yesterday, women are discussing her and her family and her situation with great vigor and energy. The media is making legitimate efforts to capture those conversations, dissect, and analyze them. But there is next to no evidence that this interest translates into increased female support for the GOP ticket. Quite the opposite, per Rasmussen Reports:
If McCain's strategy was to reach out to women voters, however, thus far it hasn't been successful. The night after the announcement, slightly more women voters viewed Palin as the right choice for McCain's running mate, but now 41% say she was not, versus 36% who still believe she was a good choice. Forty-one percent (41%) of women say they are less likely now to vote for McCain because of Palin, as opposed to 31% who say they are more likely to support him. Women voters were essentially even on this question in the earlier survey.
Men still back McCain's decision. Forty-one percent (41%) say she was the right choice, while 37% disagree. Earlier, men favored the decision by a 43% to 31% margin. Forty-three percent (43%) of men voters say they are more likely to vote for McCain because of his choosing of Palin as a running mate, but 34% say they are less likely to do so. This is a jump in support from the earlier survey. But even a plurality of men (47%) say Palin is not ready to be president in the event of the 72-year-old McCain being incapacitated while in the White House, although 32% believe she is ready. Women voters by a nearly two-to-one margin believe Palin is not ready.
Now, ok, a sizable portion of both men and women are unsure, and all these numbers are subject to change. Still, I find it staggering that two out of three women say Palin is unqualified to be president, and that more women say the choice of Palin makes them LESS likely to vote for McCain, while more men say it makes them MORE likely. Three conclusions from this: 1) As Ann Hulbert and others have argued, the Palin choice may well have been aimed at conservative men, who find that she shores up the ticket's "values" credential. 2) There is a big difference between women talking about Palin—even admiring her—and women's desire to vote Republican. 3) The media in general has yet to figure out how to frame stories involving a nationwide female candidate whose chief political appeal seems to be to men.