Palin Speech: Sneers Like Cheney–but if You Go Moose Hunting with Her, Hope She’s a Better Shot
John McCain’s vice presidential running mate, Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, delivered an engaging speech last night at the Republican National Convention. Her roaring crowd voraciously devoured every morsel of the copious red meat she served up with a fierceness that illustrates how she earned the nickname “Sarah Barracuda” in high school sports competition.
Jill Miller Zimon at Writes Like She Talks put together a wide compendium of opinion about McCain’s veep pick and concluded it will turn out to be a miscalculation on his part. Seems to me that Palin’s speech last night suggests otherwise.
It Takes Which Woman?
Early on I urged that both McCain and Obama should choose female running mates. Obama, leading in the polls, chose the safe route with Senator Joe Biden. McCain, who had both more to gain and more to lose, took the risk of choosing the clearly underqualified but attractive and ambitious Palin.
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She’s one tough cookie and good for her. It makes my feminist heart sing to know that even the right-wing Republicans know women are going to decide the outcome of this election.
But in a twist of fate both cruel and predictable, Palin is to women’s rights what Clarence Thomas and Ward Connerly are to civil rights: the antithesis of the quest for social justice and equality.
Sarah Palin: Mother of Contradictions
She’s a mother of contradictons, a faux feminist who claims her right to run for the second highest office in the land while aligning with the masters of women’s subjugation. She demands her family’s privacy and that her pregnant 17-year-old daughter Bristol’s “choice” to continue her pregnancy be respected yet wants to take away all other women’s privacy and their right to make their own childbearing choices without government intervention.
I could write on, but Gloria Steinem summed it up eloquently in this Los Angeles Times op ed:
Palin’s value to those patriarchs is clear: She opposes just about every issue that women support by a majority or plurality. She believes that creationism should be taught in public schools but disbelieves global warming; she opposes gun control but supports government control of women’s wombs; she opposes stem cell research but approves “abstinence-only” programs, which increase unwanted births, sexually transmitted diseases and abortions; she tried to use taxpayers’ millions for a state program to shoot wolves from the air but didn’t spend enough money to fix a state school system with the lowest high-school graduation rate in the nation; she runs with a candidate who opposes the Fair Pay Act but supports $500 million in subsidies for a natural gas pipeline across Alaska; she supports drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve, though even McCain has opted for the lesser evil of offshore drilling. She is Phyllis Schlafly, only younger
.
Over at Blogher, there has been much back-and-forth, multipartisan banter about Palin’s speech, but one comment really caught my eye:
I am offended that while Palin’s family is supposed to be off limit to criticism, and I agree that they should, she gets to parade them before the public and score Mommy points and, by inference, anti-abortion candidate points as a mom with a special needs infant and a pregnant, unwed 17 year old daughter standing there with the Baby Daddy at her side. You don’t get to have it both ways Palin. I’m not saying Palin has to hide her family. Absolutely not. But there was something surreal about watching a Party whose strong conservative base believes that a woman can’t/shouldn’t pastor a church and that a wife should submit to her husband trot out a woman with a young brood of five as a candidate to run the country. Take off the gloves, ladies.
Did You Catch the Sneer?
By and large CNN’s pundits give Palin’s speech an “A” grade with caveats about what that means and whether it might or might not turn into votes in November. Stacy Beam at CafePolitico says Palin benefitted from low expectations going into the speech.
But did you notice how she curled her mouth into a Cheney-esque sneer while hurling epithets at the mild-mannered Sen Harry Reid and while sarcastically disparaging Barack Obama’s community organizing work? Never mind that we’d never have had an American Revolution were it not for community organizing. I predict that one will come back to haunt her.
But Palin doesn’t just sneer like Cheney ); her environmental policy is like his too–drill, drill, drill. In fact, she threw out all the buzz words her audience wanted to hear, as this wordle.net graphic shows:
Many times during the speech I had that “down-is-up and up-is-down” feeling I’ve experienced so many times during George W. Bush’s presidency, and for good reason: every economic, national security, war, and tax policy she mentioned predict four more years, or heaven help us, eight just like the same failed administration America is reeling from now. Yet she managed to spin it as though all these failures have been the fault of either the Democrats or the media.
Joe Biden’s tepid response today on the morning shows didn’t give me any sense of security that the Obama campaign has figured out how to deal with the bundle of contradictions that make up Sarah Palin. How will the terminally loose-lipped, grey haired Biden play in a debate against the spunky, charismatic Palin? How will these two men counter the energy she has brought to the evangelical Republican base?
Since we’re all agreed women are going to determine the outcome of this election, it’s clear Obama/Biden need the help of all the women who agree a McCain presidency would be a disaster. As the Blogher commenter advised, “Take off the gloves ladies.”
http:www.GloriaFeldt.com/heartfeldt-politics-blog
cross posted at Blogher
GLORIA FELDT is the New York Times bestselling author of several books including No Excuses: 9 Ways Women Can Change How We Think About Power, a sought-after speaker and frequent contributor to major news outlets, and the Co-Founder and President of Take The Lead. People has called her “the voice of experience,” and among the many honors she has been given, Vanity Fair called her one of America’s “Top 200 Women Legends, Leaders, and Trailblazers,” and Glamour chose her as a “Woman of the Year.”
As co-founder and president of Take The Lead, a leading women’s leadership nonprofit, her mission is to achieve gender parity by 2025 through innovative training programs, workshops, a groundbreaking 50 Women Can Change The World immersive, online courses, a free weekly newsletter, and events including a monthly Virtual Happy Hour program and a Take The Lead Day symposium that reached over 400,000 women globally in 2017.