One Woman Against the Sarah Palin Maelstrom

Asked, this week, to contribute my two cents worth to an effort entitled "Women Against Sarah Palin," I found myself oddly reluctant to do so, though among the people I know (male or female), I am certainly among the most appalled by the circus that has erupted following the announcement of Ms. Palin as John McCain's choice for VP. After a few days' mulling, I decided that I don't like the implications of proclaiming myself "against Sarah Palin." Although it is true that I disagree absolutely with every Sarah Palin ideal, value, principle, or policy of which I have so far learned, I suspect that to be against Sarah Palin might be to play right into the hands of those who conceived the political gambit of choosing her for the McCain ticket.

I do, however, agree whole-heartedly with those who solicited my input that if some part of the McCain strategy was the hope that choosing a woman would draw the votes of women who wanted to see Hillary Clinton as the Obama running mate, then it’s time for those women to speak up and disabuse Senator McCain and his cohorts of the notion.

I am appalled by the nomination of Sarah Palin.

I am appalled for all the ordinary reasons that other liberal thinkers are appalled:

*I am against the idea that books can and should be removed from library shelves because some people don’t like them.

*I am against the idea that abortion is wrong in every circumstance, including rape and incest.

*I am against the idea that creationism should be taught in the science classroom alongside evolution.

*I am against the idea that young people should not be educated about the dangers of profligate sexual activity.

*I am against the idea that gay marriage should be banned.

*I am against the idea that mankind is not contributing to global warming.

*I am against the idea that offshore drilling or drilling in the country’s National Wildlife Refuges will constitute a long-term solution to the world’s energy problem and that, therefore, the environmental cost is worth the gain in oil.

*I am against the idea that the war in Iraq is an act of God’s will, a justified and holy action against those who attacked the United States on 9/11.

*I am against the idea that we can, and therefore should, win the war in Iraq.

*I am against the idea that spending federal money on a project other than the “Bridge to Nowhere” demonstrates standing up to Congress on the issue of earmarks.

*I am against the idea that religion is an appropriate guiding force for governmental policy.

*I am against the idea that being the titular head of the Alaska National Guard gives one experience in military or foreign policy, particularly when the number of orders one has issued to the National Guard to date is zero.

*I am against the idea that the fact that Alaska is near Russia qualifies one as having foreign policy experience.

*I am against the idea that aerial hunting is an activity that ought to be funded by the state—or is an activity that ought to be undertaken at all.

*I am against the idea that Polar Bears should not be classified as endangered because it is more important to keep developing oil sources.

If the choice of Ms. Palin was aimed at people like me, who preferred Senator Clinton to Senator Obama as a potential presidential candidate, then let me go on record as saying that I am not converted. I do not think that all women are Hillary Clinton, or that any woman is equally qualified to serve in the highest office of government as any other, just because she IS a woman, or that views on issues of personal freedom, environment, or national security are less relevant than gender in choosing a national executive. I do not, in short, think that any woman will do, any more than I think any man will do. For the record: I am one woman whom it will be impossible for Sarah Palin to charm into supporting John McCain.

That said, I am further compelled to say that Ms. Palin’s attitudes themselves, though disturbing in the fact that alone and together they offer a vision of the world that seems short-sighted and contrary to the kind of vision of personal freedom that a vigorous implementation of the spirit of the Constitution would allow us to achieve, as well as representing a world view that, institutionalized, would effect a move away from progress in basic human rights, seem to me to be less disturbing in and of themselves than the larger implications of the fact that McCain chose Palin at all, or of the profoundly disturbing tenor of the political discourse resulting from that choice.

I don’t really think that the primary motivation in selecting Sarah Palin as a running mate was the hope of luring disaffected Hillary fans to the McCain effort. That was my immediate reaction when I first heard of the choice, but that was before I knew anything at all about Governor Palin. Having had a few weeks to learn, I am now convinced that anyone who thought that Governor Palin could win over even one Hillary voter would have to be seriously deluded. I think now that the motivation for choosing Sarah Palin was a great deal less obvious and a great deal more subversive. What Sarah Palin brings to the McCain campaign is not the power to lure Hillary Clinton voters, but rather the power to derail serious political discourse and to drag the whole campaign down to the level of mud-slinging frenzy.

Sarah Palin functions as a lightning rod precisely because of her extremist, contradictory, even arguably hypocritical statements. She angers liberal thinkers so deeply that the temptation to attend to her is very nearly irresistible. I recognize the powerful pull of the completely outrageous; I recognize the overwhelming desire to respond to the fear that this woman and her policies could actually end up running this country. I admit it: I’ve read more newspaper articles and listened to more news stories about Sarah Palin than I did about any of the other candidates before this. And I think this is precisely what the McCain campaign was counting on. The more we are outraged by Sarah Palin, the more time and energy and inches of newsprint we expend on showing how outrageous she is, the safer McCain is from scrutiny. Every day that goes by on which we don’t put McCain onstage answering questions front and center is another day that people don’t see how old he looks, don't consider whether he is physically up to at least four years of a gruelling job, don’t attend to how mean-spirited his ads and speeches have become, don’t attend to how much his platform has morphed from what it once was. Every day that we expend on Palin is another day that McCain doesn't have to sell himself as worthy and capable of doing the job for which Palin is NOT in line.

While people from all areas of the political spectrum busy themselves in screaming fights over whether the press is being “too mean” to Sarah Palin or whether anyone would have asked “that question” to a male candidate, or how unfair it is for anyone to drag the Palin children into the political fray, or whether the democratic candidate is too “elitist,” the real issues are off the table. Every time Barack Obama and his campaign succumb to the invitation to engage on the issue of Sarah Palin herself, they open themselves to character attacks, and they sacrifice another opportunity to debate their own issues on their own terms. Sarah Palin is a star, and we have all turned ourselves into the fawning paparazzi that trails around stardom. In a 2005 episode of The West Wing entitled “Freedonia,” Donna Moss drew fire to the John Hoynes campaign by allowing herself to be suckered into arguing with a man in a chicken suit. Far from backfiring, I think that the Sarah Palin pick has accomplished exactly what it was intended to accomplish. These days, thanks to the injection of Sarah Palin into the political mix, we are all become Donna Moss, humiliating ourselves by arguing with a chicken. A hated war, an economy on a potentially catastrophic downswing, impending environmental disaster: all are forgotten or, at the very least, demoted to irrelevancies when it comes to choosing a President.

I am against the degradation of the political process into squabbling over hurt feelings. Even more than that, I am against the deeper insult to women—and to voters in general—implied by this McCain decision. The selection of a woman because she can be counted on to lead a tremendous national charge into the trivial and the irrelevant is the exact opposite of taking a woman seriously as a political force. Not so very long ago, Hillary Clinton was pilloried in the press for crying in public because crying was too womanly, and in the tenor of that day, any woman who expected to be allowed to act like a woman was considered far too weak to run a country. Now the song has changed completely, and anyone who asks the current woman to answer a tough question is accused of anti-feminist motives. Even Charles Gibson, the only person to date who has been able to deal with Governor Palin solely in the impersonal context of political issues, was immediately accused of being unfair for pursuing answers to hard questions. While the expectation that Mrs. Clinton should act like a man might be less than comforting as a sign of the real acceptance of a woman in a national leadership position, the incessant insistence that Mrs. Palin, because she is a woman, should not be expected to have to demonstrate the same knowledge, strength of character, or courage as a male candidate would have to demonstrate is less palatable still. If my read of the McCain strategy is right, Governor Palin is not offered to us as a serious political force, but rather as a creature on display—the sideshow at the circus. The selection of Sarah Palin thus constitutes no audacious storming of the male bastion of American politics; rather it demonstrates a deep contempt for women as equal participants in affairs of state.

This contempt appears to me to extend beyond Governor Palin to the electorate. The whole Palin strategy depends on the expectation that voters will allow themselves to be lured away from the substantive by a few crumbs of novelty, surprise, and the excitement of outrageous extremism. So far, many of us have played our assigned roles uncomplainingly, and this is what I find the most distressing aspect of the whole brouhaha. I want to think that the largest segment of the American population consists of people who will choose reason over emotion when it comes to making important, long-term decisions, care about real issues that make the difference between whether people live or die more than they care about whether a candidate’s five weekly girls’-night-out friends would vote for her, and cannot be fooled into voting yet again for someone blatantly being promoted as a small-town buddy we would love to have a beer with.

My greatest sorrow arising out of the Sarah Palin maelstrom is seeing the American public tied up in knots over what doesn’t matter, because such a vision makes a mockery of my desire for a wise, educated, and caring electorate committed to the greater good. The thing I am most against in the whole sorry mess is the possibility that people will forget that the two most recent elections, each based on the very policies McCain and Palin are now preaching, led to eight disastrous years which we cannot afford to repeat, that they will once again succumb to the allure of runaway pandering to weaknesses, fears, knee-jerk reactions, and short-term desires, and that they will once again elect someone who holds in contempt the needs of the people they are sworn to serve. I may be against Sarah Palin’s views, the degradation of the female as a political force, and the McCain campaign’s apparent confidence in its ability to manipulate an easily-manipulated public, but I am most of all against the general public’s living down to McCain’s expectation.

I cannot say that the choice of Governor Palin for VP has made me less likely to vote for Senator McCain, for there was no possibility that I would have voted for Senator McCain to begin with; what I can say is that the choice of Governor Palin frightens me. It suggests to me that Senator McCain is not as straightforward and honest as I had thought he was. It suggests to me that Senator McCain is less, not more, of a maverick than I had thought he was. It suggests to me that Senator McCain is far more like George W. Bush than I had thought he was, and that he is, therefore, much more dangerous as a potential president than I had thought he was, because the choice of Sarah Palin reflects an attitude toward political decision-making that raises the spectre of another Machiavellian administration which believes in winning at all costs, and so glories in manipulating public opinion. I may not like the implications of being said to be “against Sarah Palin,” but I am profoundly against the implementation of another administration which expends its time and energy and our national resources on amassing power to itself, rather than on generating real solutions to real problems.


Internet Sources (all accessed 9/13/08):
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