Joan Walsh blogged today about how she's starting to feel sympathy for Sarah Palin in light of the McCain camp's anonymous trashing of her recent performances for the campaign. I suspect McCain using Palin as a scapegoat has been the end game of his camp all along -- she gets a little bit a credit if they win, and all the blame if they lose -- a no-lose position for the losing McCain, they likely thought.
When I saw Palin's first interview with Couric, I thought, "Oh, God -- they picked her to be the scapegoat." She was too certain in her right to be there, too oblivious to the degree to which she was out of her depth. Being in possession of that kind of certitude, she would never suspect that her choice was a craven political one made to insulate McCain from any blame for a campaign they must have known was a loser even before the convention.
I didn't feel sorry for her, but I did feel bad for the place in history that she would occupy. As the second (and second unsuccessful) female candidate for VP on a major party ticket, she still would represent an historical place for women's progress. Knowing that she was picked as a scapegoat made me despise McCain even more than I already had, because he not only scapegoated her, but also the notion of women being a plus on the national executive ticket.
After all (I say, sarcastically and with McCain's smugly awkward shrug), he did everything he could. He picked someone who energized the radical right! He picked someone younger to balance out the ticket! He picked a woman, making history to match Obama's sense of history. Gosh, my friends, what more could he have done? It's not his fault she was an idiot! It's not his fault she wouldn't heed his wise words and those of his seasoned advisers! It's too bad, right? I mean, if she hadn't been such an albatross, if she hadn't had a white trash family, if she hadn't been ignorant and lost party confidence (causing traitors like Buckley and Powell to give key endorsements to Obama whether or not they swayed any voters at all), if she had been a good girl and stuck to the script, then War Hero McCain would have beaten that crypto-terrorist muslim who will make us all drive French cars to our socialist drug clinics where we'll be forced into pot-fueled gay marriages presided over by arabs (mark his words, my friends).
I don't pity Palin. I pity -- as I have pitied since she was chosen -- the qualified women on the right who will now have no chance at the White House. There will come a point at which the postmortem will not only blame Palin but also the woman-oriented aspects of her role in the campaign, her wardrobe kerfuffle, her "sexiness," her kids, her ignorance (which will be assigned a womanly quality -- too hard to balance everything at home with such a big task, better leave it to the big boys), etc. She has been criticized in ways that have been fair and appropriate and in ways that have been sexist and inappropriate, but the latter will take on a life of its own when the chips are down on the right, which hates women anyway and will happily blame her for all of the ticket's sins (and the left will be too elated by Obama's win and too happy to pile on to care about the effect on women candidates in the GOP or otherwise). That effect is something to be pitied, as it is a hit to equality that hurts all women, right and left.
Plus, I have no doubt that the faults of the Palin candidacy and their having been the downfall of the presidency that McCain so absolutely deserved (he was a POW -- did you know that?!?), will be set, finally, upon the doorstep of one Hillary Rodham Clinton. If she hadn't [insert one's choice of "bad" thing here from choices such as: playing "identity politics" by, uh, being a woman and appealing to women; almost winning the race, "forcing" McCain to pander to women by picking a female VP; being a more qualified and polished female candidate than Palin, making her look worse by comparison; bringing out all that sexism in the evil media so that it wasn't seen as a big deal when it was used against Palin; etc.], then Palin wouldn't have looked so bad and wouldn't have caused Poor War Hero McCain to lose the race.
For those who wonder how Palin would get to pass to the front of the line for consideration in 2012, making her albatross-itude the real fault of perennial whipping post Hillary Clinton will cleanse Palin of her 2008 sins. She can marry off Bristol, get Trig to his even more TV-cute toddler phase, leave behind Troopergate, and -- most importantly -- study up on issues so that she can come out in 2012 and show the world how she "really" is and put this race behind her. That process of blaming a Clinton to redeem a Republican is so second nature to the right wing machine that no one will blink an eye when the memes show up. Plus, when a woman is seen as improving her status by denigrating another woman, the media will wash its hands of any claims of sexism without a moment's pause. Those moments, those memes I will pity. Sarah Palin I will not.
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Joan Walsh
Kerry Lauerman
Gibson Girl
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Salon.com
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when I say the phrase "the next highly qualified woman on the right" I am using "qualified" in a highly qualified manner.
The problem is, the Republicans will never put one of their qualified women on their national ticket until they can give up being a one-issue party obsessed with abortion. Kay Bailey Hutchison, who would have been a very intelligent choice for McCain, was probably unacceptable because she's not rabidly pro-life; same goes for Snowe, Collins, and Whitman.
As long as the theocons insist on this particular litmus test you will see candidates like Palin or even Michelle Bachmann on the ticket but never one of their truly qualified moderates.
Whereas Palin seem to be aiming for the 2012 elections - no idea if that's feasible though.
Yeah, she's a real phony.
She fakes her accent. She claims she's just an ordinary person but then she goes and blows $150K on a single shopping spree. She acts like she's just a normal mom but then she bills the state of Alaska for time spent at her house.
You know the only difference between Sarah Palin and a "entertainer" twirling around a pole in a Vegas strip club?
The entertainer is actually somewhat attractive.
Any thoughts about this speculation (and it is, of course, entirely speculative)?
The crowds of hero-worshippers who gush about her authenticity are completely confounding to me. I see her as 100% phony. She is the consummate opportunist in lipstick and heels. Sarah Palin has done a great disservice to the feminist movement. Her vacuousness, her inclination to project style over substance, her superficial kinship with the “Joes” of the world—it’s all so disingenuous. Which is why I hope the 2012 prophesy is wrong. Another campaign with Sarah Palin as the protagonist would be utterly insufferable.
What does that tell you about the stupidity of Sarah Palin?
On another note, I am sick and tired of all politicians pandering to small town America. Hello? It only has 20 percent of the population and that percentage is going lower every single day.
No, real America is in the cities. That's where the jobs are, that's where the money is, and that's where the population growth is occurring.
I have no sympathy for Sarah Palin. I do for what she has done for the women of this nation. I do believe she has done a disservice to those qualified women on the left and right both. I do believe though that if we have thoughtful leadership over the next few years that this aberration will be overcome with highly qualified women in positions of leadership. Hillary Clinton is perhaps the most likely to lead us away from the Sarah Palin diabolical.
The callous reasoning for nominating Sarah Palin by the Republican Party was for me unconscionable. It was done with only the thought, that of winning the Presidency. Not of picking a qualified candidate. I also believe those who came up with the idea were sure they could control Sarah. Now they may be having buyer’s remorse. She may well steer the party even more to the Right and towards even more knee jerk reaction than it has been in the recent past. This is very likely to put it in permanent minority status for some time.
Don't shed tears for Palin, she is blatantly ambitious and with a self righteous streak I have seen all too often in my life. Such people have always found ways to blame others for the failures and continue on their way in life running over people with little thought of anyone other than their selves. Perhaps Sarah will become the fall person for some in the Republican Party as well as some in the press. But I doubt it will affect Sarah. I feel she has only herself to blame but we can expect her to blame the press and those “Elite” Republican handlers for this failure.
I don’t see Sarah as an introspective person in the least, just raw ambition coupled with a self righteous streak which has so far taken her much farther than her qualifications should have allowed. If she had even and ounce of introspective she would never have taken the nomination in the first place as she would have known she was over her head.
I, too, am tired of hearing about small town America as the real America. I am from small town America. I think small towns have some great qualities, but they also often have staggering levels of intolerance. I don't see how that is a quality that is somehow American.
Specifically with respect to Sarah Palin, she and her family did require something of a makeover, as we now see from the leaks of the upcoming Newsweek piece (among others) on her clothing expenditures. And, of course, her daughter Bristol's unintended teenage pregnancy and impending shotgun wedding did not project the kind of abstinence-only, wait-until-marriage "family values" often promoted by the Republican party.
To tie your two requests together, here is a quote from the Newsweek piece found at (http://www.newsweek.com/id/167581):
"An angry aide characterized the shopping spree as 'Wasilla hillbillies looting Neiman Marcus from coast to coast,' and said the truth will eventually come out when the Republican Party audits its books."
"Hillbillies" vs. "white trash"? Not a lot of difference, IMO. In another article, this time in the New York Times (found at http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/06/us/politics/06mccain.html?_r=1&oref=slogin, although I don't know if the link will work), the McCain camp talked about -- as I predicted -- Palin's inability to take advice from the more experienced McCain people. Yet another article (the link references a Fox News story: http://www.mlive.com/elections/index.ssf/2008/11/reports_mccain_at_odds_with_pa.html) has McCain staffers leaking damaging information about Palin's ignorance, including an inability to describe which countries were part of NAFTA and a lack of awareness that Africa was a continent. The above were the first few articles in a simple Google of "mccain palin infighting," but there were thousands more...and we're only two days after the election.
Good enough?