{"id":4732,"date":"2008-08-30T14:56:08","date_gmt":"2008-08-30T22:15:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.amptoons.com\/blog\/archives\/2008\/08\/30\/the-sexism-of-the-palin-pick\/"},"modified":"2008-08-30T14:56:08","modified_gmt":"2008-08-30T22:15:56","slug":"the-sexism-of-the-palin-pick","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=4732","title":{"rendered":"The Sexism of the Palin Pick"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ann Friedman makes the case<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Palin\u2019s addition to the ticket takes Republican faux-feminism to a whole new level. As Adam Serwer pointed out<\/a> on TAPPED, this is in fact a condescending move by the GOP. It plays to the assumption that disaffected Hillary Clinton supporters did not care about her politics \u2014 only her gender. In picking Palin, Republicans are lending credence to the sexist assumption that women voters are too stupid to investigate or care about the issues, and merely want to vote for someone who looks like them. As Serwer noted, it\u2019s akin to choosing Alan Keyes in an attempt to compete with Obama for votes from black Americans.<\/p>\n

I can\u2019t help but be, oh, a little bit<\/em> skeptical of Republicans\u2019 sudden interest in the glass ceiling. After all, this is the party that threw women like Lilly Ledbetter under the bus, in favor of businesses that practice wage discrimination. The party that stymied the Equal Rights Amendment. The party that not only wants to force women here and abroad to carry unwanted pregnancies to term, but also wants to deny them access to a range of contraception options.<\/p>\n

Not to mention hypocrisy at play. Republicans directed an inexcusable amount of sexist vitriol at Hillary during the primary. As Michelle Malkin said on Fox News about Hillary, \u201cIf that\u2019s the face of experience, I think it\u2019s going to scare away a lot of those independent voters that are on the fence.\u201d At National Review<\/em>, Kathryn Jean Lopez blamed polling that said America isn\u2019t ready for a woman president on the failure of Geena Davis\u2019 TV show (in which she played a vice president who was elevated to commander in chief after the president\u2019s death). And Kristol credited Hillary\u2019s brief, misty-eyed moment for propelling her to victory in the New Hampshire primary: \u201cIt\u2019s the tears. She pretended to cry, the women felt sorry for her, and she won.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s clear that Republicans believe that what made Hillary Clinton such a good candidate was her gender, not her political experience or positions on the issues. And McCain\u2019s decision to pick Palin shows he took this message to heart and chose to add her to the ticket primarily because of her gender. In so doing, McCain has turned the idea of the first woman in the White House from a true moment of change to an empty pander.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Back in ancient history, oh, a month or two ago, when it became apparent that Barack Obama would indeed win the Democratic primary, a number of Clinton supporters objected to the idea of Obama picking a woman other than Clinton for the ticket, derisively calling it the \u201cany boobs will do\u201d theory of picking a veep. I always thought this was a bit unfair to clearly qualified candidates for the vice presidential slot, like Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, D-Kan. But I understood the point, and it made sense \u2014 just picking a woman, any woman, solely because she was a woman, was unlikely to win over Clinton supporters. Indeed, it would be far more insulting than picking a qualified man, which is ultimately what Obama did. Clinton supporters, you see, supported her not solely because she was a woman (though of course, that was a part of it), but because they believed her to be a solid leader, to be a person who would be a good president. They backed Clinton not because of her ovaries, but because of her guts; not because of her breasts, but because of her mind.<\/p>\n

Palin is the \u201cany boobs will do\u201d pick to the n<\/em>th degree. Not only does Palin lack the qualifications of Clinton, but she lacks the ideological bent, as well. Clinton supporters might have objected to, say, Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., on the ticket, given that McCaskill\u2019s experience is not what Clinton\u2019s is. But at least McCaskill\u2019s pro-choice. She\u2019s liberal on economic issues. She\u2019s a feminist. She\u2019s on Sen. Clinton\u2019s side of the aisle. <\/span><\/p>\n

Palin is a reactionary conservative, one comfortable with supporting Pat Buchanan. She\u2019s opposed to abortion even in cases of rape and incest. She\u2019s got absolutely no international experience, unless you want to count her trying to run an oil pipeline through part of Canada. And her experience pales compared to Clinton\u2019s. Indeed, it pales compared to Dan Quayle\u2019s in 1988. Even Rep. Geraldine Ferraro, D-N.Y., had been in the House for six years when Walter Mondale tapped her as his running mate, had served as chair of the DNC\u2019s platform committee, and as secretary of the House Democratic Caucus.<\/p>\n

Palin is the most cynical of picks, a woman selected because women just want to vote for women \u2014 a pick that fails to recognize that women actually believe things, that they vote on issues, that they care about having a woman in office not because any woman will do, but so that women advance in American society.<\/p>\n

This isn\u2019t to say Sarah Palin is stupid \u2014 you don\u2019t rise from the PTA to the governor\u2019s mansion if you are. But she lacks the experience of a Vice Presidential candidate. Not since Spiro T. Agnew has a major party placed such an inexperienced candidate on the ticket. And Agnew ended up being an unmitigated disaster. Then-President Richard Nixon considered ousting him before the 1972 race, and Agnew ended up becoming the second vice president to resign the office in 1973, ultimately pleading no contest to bribery and tax evasion charges.<\/p>\n

That the candidates we compare Palin to are Quale and Agnew and, at best, Ferraro are not good signs for her. None of the three had distinguished careers; while Quayle and Agnew did win, they certainly did not acquit themselves well in office. Ferraro was on the wrong side of one of the worst electoral blowouts in American history, and while that wasn\u2019t her fault, her historic pick certainly didn\u2019t help Mondale avoid a shellacking. She followed that up by losing a race for Senate in New York and ultimately offending all of Barack Obama\u2019s supporters and many of Hillary Clinton\u2019s supporters by arguing that Obama faced no racism in the campaign. Agnew left politics in disgrace. Quayle became a national punchline and made an abortive attempt at the presidency in 2000, only to drop out before voting started. None of the three have had the careers of Al Gore or Walter Mondale or George H.W. Bush or, heck, even Tom Eagleton.<\/p>\n

Palin isn\u2019t ready for the vice presidency. And she wouldn\u2019t have been selected if she was Steve Palin, radical anti-choice first-term governor of Alaska. Unlike Hillary Clinton or a dozen other Democratic women (or indeed, many other Republican women), she\u2019s not remotely ready to assume the duties of president should John McCain die in office. In short, she\u2019s not capable of carrying out the most important duty the vice president has. I\u2019m glad that McCain picked a woman to serve on the ticket. But I wish she\u2019d been one that was on the ticket because she was a strong, capable, prepared leader. Maybe, after a few more years and some more seasoning, Palin could be that leader \u2014 I\u2019ve certainly seen nothing to indicate that she\u2019s anything other than intelligent and capable of growing as a leader, and one would hope that she does. But she\u2019s not ready yet. And because of that, her choice is an insult \u2014 to women, to men, to the American people. And to Palin herself \u2014 for she deserves better than to be picked for her reproductive organs, rather than her ability.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ann Friedman makes the case: Palin\u2019s addition to the ticket takes Republican faux-feminism to a whole new level. As Adam Serwer pointed out on TAPPED, this is in fact a condescending move by the GOP. It plays to the assumption … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27,31],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4732","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-elections-and-politics","category-feminism-sexism-etc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4732","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4732"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4732\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4732"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4732"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4732"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}