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Sarah Palin, Wrong Woman for the Job
August 30, 2008
John McCain's choice of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as running mate shows how desperate he is to distract attention from the fact that he is a cranky old man with nothing to offer but more of the same. Palin is a blatant pander for the women's vote. He must think we have the collective IQ of a Tampax.
Sure, Palin is cool -- she's pretty and vivacious and athletic, a former beauty queen who runs marathons, hunts , fishes and eats mooseburgers, plus she's got five kids with unusual names like Willow and Track, including a newborn with Down's syndrome. I feel tired just thinking of what her daily life must be like, and if she were my neighbor I would probably like her a lot. It shows how deeply feminism has penetrated American culture that even anti-choice, right-wing-Christian women are breaking out of the old sugary-submissive pastel-suited stereotype. And if life were a Lifetime movie, Palin would do just fine running the country should McCain keel over. Girls can do anything! and look great doing it!
But seriously. Vice President? After a stint as the mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, a town of less than 8000, and barely two years as governor of a state with more grizzly bears than people? She makes Obama's resume look as thick as Winston Churchill's.
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I Heart Michelle Obama
August 28, 2008
Michelle Obama's performance Monday night was spectacular. She was confident, warm, relaxed and eloquent, also smart, beautiful,radiant, gracious, stylish, humorous and tall. I want to be her when I grow up. She accomplished, seemingly effortlessly, what she had to do: she replaced the angry-black-Pantherish terrorist- fist-bumping Michelle of right-wing (and not only right-wing) fantasy with Michelle, the normal, everyday, working-class-rooted loving wife and (working) mother. She presented herself and her family -- her parents, her brother, her daughters, and her husband -- as part of an ongoing all-American story of devotion to faith, family, hard work,community, sports, and, yes, country.
When she talked about her childhood--her father and his slow deterioriation from multiple sclerosis, her parent's hopes and sacrifices for her and her brother--I cried. I know, I know, how hokey that is, but I'll bet all over America, people were wiping their eyes.
In her column about the speech, even Mona Charen paused momentarily in her Obama-bashing labors to declare herself moved and impressed. Then, of course, it was back to business: Michelle's 1985 Princeton senior thesis, the Rev. Wright, a quotation from a New Yorker profile suggesting that Michelle Obama thinks America has some problems--because that is just so, so not true.
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In Search of the Elusive PUMAs
August 26, 2008
Monday, August 25
Good Omen: the people sitting in front of me on the plane read The Nation! Anna and Russ from Washington DC are coming to the convention as tourists. Apparently a lot of people are doing this. Who knew? Anna and Russ are huge Obama fans, and (like everyone I will meet today) are confident he will win in November. For extra fun they've brought along their two year old, Juliet. Brave souls. "What do you say about George Bush?" says Anna, using her singsong mommy voice. "Do you remember what we call George Bush?" I imagine it's something not too favorable, but Juliet, who has clearly already begun her life in politics, just gives a diplomatic smile.
You're not supposed to write about interviewing cabbies, which is too bad because the extremely good-looking and cheerful Somali driver who takes me into downtown Denver has a lot of interesting things to say about American intervention in Africa that I'll just keep to myself. But I have to report that, like most of the taxi drivers I've met in the last year, he's for Obama. "America used to be admired all over the world. It's fixable! If foreign policy changes, America is America again." Put that way, it sounds so simple. "If he loses, it's because of race. When people say 'we don't know who he is' -- that's race. When people say, 'he's really a Muslim' -- that's race. He went to a Christian church for twenty years, but he's really a Muslim? What kind of a Muslim is that?" Not for the first time, I'm struck by how many ordinary people not only have as much political acumen as most pundits, but have learned to talk like them too. Why can't this driver go on TV, and Chris Matthews drive a cab?
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Good-Bye, John Edwards
August 9, 2008
So now we know. John Edwards did have sex with that woman, Rielle Hunter, just as the National Enquirer said. So much for all those jokes about Bat Boy and Hillary's alien baby. I always thought the Edwards rumors were true, because rumors like that usually are (says she cynically) , and I defended this view in many an e mail. But every time I started to write something about it here I would get into a debate about monogamy, privacy, Puritanism, the reliability of tabloids etc with one of our more polyamorous editors, and the air would leak out of my balloon. I would think, Well, really, what do I know? and Oh why add to poor Elizabeth's troubles? I still sort of think that.
So good-bye to Edwards, aka the electable white man. I suppose you could say he's done the nation a favor by further tarnishing that overrated and outdated brand. (If you don't want to hear about women who give themselves names like Rielle and their love children, elect more female candidates!) If he had had more substance to begin with -- a thicker resume, more raw political talent,a bigger, more enthusiastic following, a more, how to put this, compelling and endearing personality -- an affair might not be fatal to his future. After all, Clinton got elected despite Gennifer Flowers. But , as Gail Collins points out, there just wasn't that much to Edwards, besides his policy proposals. Apparently the electorate intuited that. Fortunately, or we'd have just handed the election to McCain.
I supported Edwards because he was the only candidate who talked seriously about inequality, but the truth is I never liked him -- the 28,000 square foot house, the canned son-of-a-millworker routine, the endless parading of his family and its perfections, the (as it seemed to me) politically manipulative use of his son's tragic death and his wife's cancer. "I care about the policy, not the person," one of his academic advisers told me when I confessed my visceral dislike, and I felt properly rebuked for my superficiality. What, after all, did I really know about Edwards the person? What difference did his little vanity vibes make when compared with poverty, which only Edwards was willing to declare scandalous -- and curable?
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Stealth Assault on Reproductive Rights
August 4, 2008
When pro-choicers accuse anti-choicers of being anti-contraception they're often taken as crying wolf -- even though no anti-choice organization explicitly endorses birth control and despite the prominent anti-choice role of the Catholic Church, which explicitly bans contraception. After all, goes the complacent point of view, most women, and most couples, use some form of birth control. Opposition to it seems like something out of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, a novel whose futuristic vision of women's subjection to rightwing Christian patriarchs no less a shrewd social critic than Mary McCarthy found preposterous when she reviewed it in the New York Times Book Review in 1986.
The Bush Administration seems bent on giving Atwood material for a sequel. Last month, Health and Human Services issued a draft of new regulations which would require health-care providers who receive federal funds to accept as employees nurses and other workers who object to abortion and even to most kinds of birth control. This rule would cover some 500,000 hospitals, clinics, and other medical facilities-- including family planning clinics, which would, absurdly, legally be bound to hire people who will obstruct their very mission. To refuse to hire them, or to fire them, would be to lose funds for discriminating against people who object to abortion for religious or --get this -- moral beliefs.
This represents quite an expansion of health workers' longstanding right not to be involved in abortion. And, incidentally, this respect for moral beliefs only goes one way. A Catholic hospital has no corresponding obigation to hire pro-choice workers or accomodate their moral beliefs by permitting them to offer emergency contraception to rape victims or hand out condoms to the HIV positive; a "crisis pregnancy center" would not have to hire pro-choice counsellors who would tell women that abortion would not really give them breast cancer or leave them sterile. Only anti-choicers, apparently, have moral beliefs that entitle them to jobs they refuse to actually perform.
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McCain Opposes Contraception -- Pass It On
July 17, 2008
I realize it's not as world-shaking as the caricature of the Obamas on the cover of The New Yorker, which has the high-end media in a total tizzy. It's probably not even as important as the raunchy joke Bernie Mac told at an Obama fundraiser last week, which was bumped from the tizzy list by the New Yorker story. But can't the commentariat take a break from itself and let the world know how much John McCain opposes birth control? Vastly more people rely on contraception than read The New Yorker or know Bernie Mac from mac'n' cheese. In fact, vastly more people use birth control than believe Obama is a secret Muslim. They might like to know that when it comes to contraception, McCain is no maverick.
Here's the story. Last week, Carly Fiorina, the former CEO of Hewlett-Packard who has been helping McCain look bright-eyed and estrogen-friendly, told reporters that women wanted more choice in their health care plans; for example, it bothered women when plans covered Viagra but not contraception. Big mistake! McCain had voted against a bill that would have required plans to cover birth control if they covered prescription meds at all, like, um, Viagra. McCain's nonresponse when queried about this by a reporter was astonishing. As posted on Youtube, he squirms and grins and smirks (Viagra! Embarrassing!) and fumfers about evasively. "I don't know enough about it to give you an informed answer," he manages to splutter, "because I don't recall the vote, I've cast thousands of votes... it's something I've not thought much about."
So. John McCain is so opposed to contraception he voted against requiring insurance plans to cover it like other drugs, and either so indifferent to women's health and rights or just so out of it he doesn't even remember how he voted. That's the way to show American women you really care.
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Preachers and Politics
April 30, 2008
For years, Democrats have been trying to shed their secular image in order to appeal to voters who think Jesus is a Republican. As the saying goes, be careful what you wish for, because now, thanks to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, the Democrats have got religion and everything that comes with it -- weirdness, wrath, insult, blowhardiness, vanity, paranoia, divisiveness and trouble. When Barack Obama told the 2004 Democratic convention, "We worship an awesome god in the blue states," this probably wasn't the result he had in mind.
By repudiating Wright Tuesday, Obama missed a chance to call on McCain to turn away from his own problematic clerical helpers. McCain still welcomes the endorsement of the televangelist John Hagee, who has famously attributed Hurricane Katrina to God's wrath at homosexuals, calls the Catholic church "the great whore," claims the Koran commands Muslims to kill Jews and Christians, condemns the Harry Potter books as witchcraft, and wants a world war over Israel, whose most aggressive settlement policies he vigorously supports, because it will precipitate the Second Coming of Christ.
As Sarah Posner lays out in an excellent post for TAPPED, Wright and Hagee have a lot in common. Both believe that chickens come home to roost--in New Orleans, on 9/11--and that God sends them. Both think America is sinful. Both have bizarre ideas with terrible, real-world implications: Hagee wants the US and israel to attack Iran to bring on the end times; Rev. Wright claims the United States government invented the HIV virus "as a means of genocide against people of color."
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Why Tom Hayden Makes Me Scream
April 24, 2008
I want to do my bit for Obama, so I vowed I would give up attacking Obama-supporting progressives for the duration of the presidential campaign. No circular firing squads for me! Believe me, it hasn't been easy, and now Tom Hayden's "Why Hillary Makes My Wife Scream" has pushed me over the edge. Who cares what Tom Hayden's wife, the peaceful organic Barbara, feels when she watches Hillary on TV? Hayden is employing an ancient literary-political device, in which a man wards off charges of sexism by citing the example of a woman: I'm not averse to votes for women, but my wife, sir, won't hear of it! Barbara is female -- so that makes it okay for Hayden quote her comparing Hillary Clinton to "a screech on the blackboard" and Lady Macbeth. Because those are certainly similes that have never been used before! And that have no misogynist connotations, as in a woman who seeks public power is shrill and strident, a would-be despot who'll stop at nothing to achieve her evil ends, and is just so darn unlikeable, too. So bitter! As for Clinton flack "that Kiki person" -- when Hayden makes fun of a woman's girly first name and finds her just too ridiculous even to have a last one, that is not at all like rightwingers mocking Lani --Lani! ha ha ha! -- Guinier back in the day.
By rummaging in the tired old grabbag of male-chauvinist cliches, Hayden undermines the point he eventually gets around to making: that Clinton's attacks on Obama for guilt-by-association with Rev. Wright and Bill Ayres are vile and low and will come back to haunt her should she win the nomination. Not only is she alienating Obama supporters she'll need for the general election, she's inviting attacks on herself for her own past connections with leftwing figures and causes. Hayden calls on progressives to "send a message" to Hillary to "immediately cease her path of destruction." (Cease her path?) Fair enough.
Well, here's my message to Tom Hayden: Cease your path! Every time you and your fellow progressives write your sexist/nasty/catty garbage about Hillary Clinton -- and every time the Nation publishes it, which is far too often -- you alienate women whose energy and votes you will need if Obama wins the nomination. When you start talking about "millions" of young voters and black voters refusing to work for Hillary because of her unfair attacks on Obama you invite "millions" of women to say, well, why should I work for a candidate whose prominent supporters call my candidate Lady Macbeth?
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Dear Hillary...Love, Ralph
March 30, 2008
I have no idea whether Hillary Clinton should stay in the primary race or not. People who've done the math say there's just about no chance she can squeak past Obama, which would make it kind of pointless to keep going. But of all the people who could conceivably advise her to campaign till the bitter end, I'll bet the last person she'd like to hear from is Ralph Nader. I translate his letter, which John Nichols quotes approvingly in The Notion, as follows:
Dear Hillary,
I didn't care about the consequences of my 2000 run (not that I ever admit that there were any! Florida? Not my fault! ) and neither should you care about the consequences of staying in the primaries. Consequences is for sissies and people who don't care about the First Amendment and other high-minded stuff. Besides, the Democratic party is evil! If dragging out the primaries till June or July hurts it in November, so much the better -- you might do for the Dems in 2008 what didn't do (did not! did not!) in 2000. I understand exactly how painful it must be to have everyone crushing so hard on Obama-- he's bewitched a lot of my former supporters too, which I just don't get, since he is, after all, a Democrat, like, um, Al Gore. It's like they've forgotten that the parties are basically the same and that the most important thing is to just express yourself no matter what. In fact, if you lose the nomination, why not run on your own? that's what I'm doing -- it's fun!
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McCain May Be Old, but He's Still a Threat
February 24, 2008
Liberal smarties and sophisticates are having fun mocking John McCain , but assuming he gets the nomination, he will a formidable candidate. He may look like a grumpy old man -- specifically, as my friend Kathleen Geier joked, the grumpy old man who yells at kids to get off his lawn -- or the nutty old uncle who rags on everyone at Thanksgiving before passing out in front of the football game. But that's another way of saying McCain is a familiar, indeed family, character. It does not require an imaginative stretch to get John McCain. How many voters know someone like Barack Obama?
McCain is white, male, patriarchal, a war hero with decades in the Senate. So what if he's old? In politics old can be good ( for men), especially to the older voters -- older white voters -- who dominate the polls. Besides, McCain's not so old that he couldn't get himself a much younger trophy wife, and even if Cindy McCain looks brittle and unhappy and like she hasn't eaten in a decade, she is always there by his side, a visual reminder of his manly prowess. McCain is brash and sly and seemingly unguarded, unlike the famously self-protective Hillary Clinton, and he loves to schmooze with reporters, who adore him and like most of the rest of America, refuse to see how conservative he is. It's like they're saying, Oh go on, Uncle John! you're just saying you love Sam Alito to get me riled up!
Obama v. McCain could be change/youth/black/exciting/internationalist against experience/maturity/white/steady/superpatriot. Put that way, it could come down to how many white male Democrats, who might vote for Hillary, won't vote for a black man, let alone one whose middle name is Hussein. They won't care about McCain's favors for business --too complicated, and anyway everyone does it -- and they certainly won't care if he had an affair with lovely lobbyist Vicki Iseman, as the New York Times sorta-kinda suggested. They might like him even better for that.
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Katha Pollitt
Strongly held opinions on politics, feminism, culture, books and daily life.
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