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From Nina Shen Rastogi, who is having technical difficulties:
Until now, the McCain family has kept their youngest child, Bridget, out of the public spotlight—in part because she's young (but not younger than Bristol Palin, we might note) and in part because, in 2000, she was used in a vicious smear campaign against her father. (It was suggested that Bridget, a dark-skinned girl adopted from Bangladesh, was the product of an interracial affair.) As one blogger notes, Bridget didn't even appear in a recent People photo shoot that featured her family alongside the Palins.
As a South Asian, I've always been interested in Bridget. But I respected the McCains' decision to protect her privacy and, in this age of adopted-child-as-designer-accessory, I sort of appreciated it. How upsetting, then, that the first time I've seen them really talk about her in a big, public way, it's to trade on her tragic past in order to buff her parents' image. I shouldn't be surprised—after all, there's been plenty of conflicting talk lately about how and when it's appropriate for candidates to use their children on the campaign trail. And everyone in a candidate's family gets symbolically trotted out at some point. But really, did Cindy have to lump her daughter in like that with a survivor from Rwanda? As if there's no different between the two? It seemed like a crass move—and, by all accounts, an inaccurate reflection of the family's genuine love for their daughter.
As a side note, someone has already been doing a lot of thinking about what Bridget's life in the White House might be like ...
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Dahlia's got it: what's depressing about Palin is that she represents the Ann Coulterization of the Republican party. That's what was tugging at my unconscious mind as I watched her spout the most vicious and irresponsible claptrap, with such a gleeful expression on her face.
Watching Palin was like watching a cross between Ann Coulter and Michelle Malkin-- only Palin accessorizes with babies. And she's got a governorship, instead of a column or a TV show.
I'm beginning to suspect that it's not just me, either. Palin offered red meat to the hungry GOP faithful, but not sure how her speech played with independents. Way too soon to really know-- but for what it's worth, a Detroit Free Press focus group wasn't too impressed with her.
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I haven’t posted yet on the Sarah Palin Show, mainly because it’s all just been too darn entertaining to stop snorting and say anything intelligent. Last week I persuaded a twentysomething family friend to tune into the Obama speech by telling her that political conventions were no different from reality TV. My young friend has been texting me with every new Palin-palooza, as astonished as I have been by how correct that assessment was.
But I do want to comment on this false idea: that just because Palin is a woman, she is also a feminist. Or that just because she’s a woman, her nomination is a feminist act. Or that just because she’s a woman, Hillary-mourning women everywhere will vote for her, inspired simply by sharing chromosomes with a candidate. As my nephews would say, nuh-uh.
Love her or hate her, Hillary wears standard-issue feminism proudly. It's based on the idea that women and men should be treated equally; that the odds are still stacked against women (and many others) in many areas of life; and that these structural issues—say, the lack of early childhood education or health care for all families—are problems we should address together, and in fact, can fix only together. That's why she got called all those nasty sexist things, like "hysterical" and "bitch": because she was trying to shake off the femininity box.
What Sarah Palin is pushing is something quite different. She's milking a kind of feminine chauvinism: I am mother (hockey mom? hot mama?), hear me roar. She's using womanhood and all its trappings to further her family and her career. Of course, many of us at least occasionally use womanhood to our advantage—can you do the Helpless Female Gaze and duck a speeding ticket? But Palin appears to have no interest in knocking down structural barriers to female (or human) flourishing. Contrary to what Anne said awhile back, Palin wouldn’t have been nominated without feminism; there just wasn’t a market for a female veep candidate until Hillary and the White House Project and all those tiresome discussions of unequal pay created that market. Now that she's nominated, though, Palin appears happy to reap that advance without expanding on it. Her gleeful meanness last night made me think of her as the infamous Queen Bee type, so brilliantly captured by Meryl Streep in The Devil Wears Prada, with its philosophy of I’m glamorous/you’re a germ. She’s got hers; you get your own, and get out of her way.
As an example of her anti-feminism, consider her line-item veto of funding to support teen moms, reported by the Washington Post. The project she slashed would have given "young mothers a place to live with their babies for up to eighteen months while they gain the necessary skills and resources to change their lives" and help teen moms "become productive, successful, independent adults who create and provide a stable environment for themselves and their families." It’s not that Alaska didn’t have the money for the project. Under Palin’s leadership, the People’s Republic of Alaska redistributed oil tax revenues, sending every one of its 670,000 residents a $3,200 payout this year. And in 2005, the state took in $1.81 in federal monies for every federal tax dollar paid by its residents, making it look like a welfare state. No, Palin was sending a clear message: Back off talking about my pregnant daughter, that’s my family’s business. Your pregnant daughter is on her own.
Palin stands for tribe-, class-, and biology-as-destiny, for letting pregnancy and poverty and group membership determine your life course. If you are dumb enough to let anything bad hit you, too bad for you. She may be a hit with the base, but she’s not gonna win over PUMAs or moderate women—at least, it hasn't happened yet. Having the right chromosomes is not enough to swindle all of the women all of the time. And I hope not most of the women at all.
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What I'm stuck on is that image of Bristol Palin and her betrothed holding hands up on stage last night, along with the rest of her family, as the party of Bill Bennett and the Family Research Council applauded. It isn't that I think she should have been locked in a closet somewhere, or shipped off for a "year abroad'' in nearby Russia. But when my best friend got pregnant in high school in the conservative town of 8,000 where we grew up, I do not remember anybody throwing her a parade; nope, pretty sure that did not happen. (I also don't remember anybody thinking that our mayor was qualified to be president, but that might be my small-town humility talkin'.) So, is the takeaway that the Republican Party is getting more tolerant, or that, as Hanna says, the only thing that matters is that she's carrying the child to term? Maybe, but when I try to imagine an Obama (or any Democrat's) daughter up there in a similar situation, my guess is no; if that happened, wouldn't we be hearing about how that's what liberal permissiveness and Hollywood and rap music and Bill Clinton hath wrought?
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Rosa, I couldn't agree more about the nastiness. What we saw last night was the mainstreaming of Ann Coulter, the normalization of the principle that it isn't bile when it's spoken by a pretty woman. Coulter has gloated, "I am emboldened by my looks to say things Republican men wouldn't." And even though the Post reports today that Palin's was a "masculine" speech—written before the final candidate was selected—it bore so very many hallmarks of a vintage Coulter/Ingraham performance. Susan Estrich describes the Coulter approach as a play "to the lowest common denominator of derision, labeling the hero a coward, her opponent a traitor ... she is about suspicion and exclusion," and anyone who pushes back is a member of the "liberal media elite" and a sexist.
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I'm not surprised that Sarah Palin can deliver a good speech. In my opinion, anyone capable of handling five kids and ANY job and not ending up in the loony bin presumptively has at least the raw smarts and managerial skills to run the Oval Office. So take a smart, tough, capable, ambitious woman, put her together for a week with the smartest, toughest, most capable and ambitious Republican political consultants, and it's a pretty good bet you're gonna come out with a woman who delivers a powerful speech.
But what an unbelievably vicious speech! The nastiness level was just sky-high (or gutter low). And though Palin certainly didn't write the words she spoke, she sure looked like she enjoyed every second of delivering those zingers. That speech wasn't meant to inspire—it wasn't about our better selves or what we might be able to accomplish, as a nation—it was all about rage, sarcasm, resentment, mockery. And the crowd just lapped it up.
Should I be surprised by this? Probably not; it's the meat and potatoes of the conservative culture wars and standard fare at Republican powwows of the past couple of decades. But all the same, I expected better of John McCain, a man I've often liked and admired over the years precisely for his resistance to using that Us-vs.-Them playbook. This year, with Obama's message of inclusion and hope, and McCain at the top of the Republican ticket, I thought we might at last break free of that kind of nastiness—that politics of smallness, of diminishment and suspicion and resentment.
Silly me.
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It was a great speech and she delivered it almost perfectly. She had one job to do tonight—persuade Americans that Barack Obama is a meringue, wrapped in a soufflé, served on imported bone china, and she did it well. And then she did it again. And again. The turns and the aphorisms and the all-out smears were delivered with a megawatt smile, which set her off from Rudy Giuliani, who simply looked to have been off his meds. They also set her apart from Hillary Clinton, who never managed to deliver a zinger without being blown back by the recoil. And if it’s small to go after community organizers, or people who are not “always proud of America,” or people with the misfortune to reside in cities, or people inspired by idealism, well so be it. She’s a small-town girl.
It’s a risky tactic: If your opponent is larger than life, strive to be smaller than life. Paint Washington, government, and the entire world stage in miniature, until it’s good enough to have been mayor of a town of 6,000, and, frankly, it would have been good enough just to have been a hockey mom. This is the view of America that scares the pants off most of our allies: That we are the view.
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