Should Women Back Palin in 2012?

Editor: This article is reprinted from The Daily Beast with the express permission of its author Amy Siskind [photo left].

Obama garnered 56 percent of women’s ballots last fall. And they have precious little to show for it from this administration. Amy Siskind on why Sarah Palin deserves a second look.

As the Senate Finance Committee moves to pass health-care legislation this week, reproductive rights has been all but sidelined as an issue by the Obama administration. Should we therefore be surprised by a stunning Pew Research Center poll last week which revealed that 42 percent of Americans don’t know that Obama is pro-choice? Maybe it’s time that women gave Sarah Palin another look.

Palin, back in the headlines for rushing out a new book ahead of schedule this fall, is fresh, open-minded, a centrist and a party noncomformist. Hey, sisters in women’s advocacy: Let’s end the decades-long cold war with Republican women candidates. If we want progress to be made on issues of importance to women, our organizations need to master a skill at which men have always been adept: negotiation.

I am a lifelong Democrat who for the first time in my life voted Republican in the 2008 elections. I did this for one reason: McCain selected a woman as his running mate. For this act, I was accused of having lost part of my mental faculty: Some circa Victorian act of “voting with my uterus.” Strange, that. The Democratic women were corralled to vote for Obama in 2008 because of one issue: reproductive rights. In other words, as my friend Cynthia Ruccia observed,  ”voting with their uterus.”

Sarah Palin did not have a governor’s seat handed down to her, she earned it.  She understands what it is to be a woman having to fight obstacles—some overt and others subtle—that only a woman can understand.

Sadly, for women, things haven’t panned out all that well with this administration. Despite receiving 56 percent of women’s votes, President Obama’s record on women’s issues thus far is sparse, and suggests something that he either has a tone-deaf nature—or, if you’re inclined to a more sinister view, that he may be uncomfortable with women.

He surely hasn’t surrounded himself with many. Of his 24 Cabinet picks, only six were women. Perhaps even more telling are President Obama’s czar picks, which do not require Senate confirmation. Of the 35-40 picks he’s made to date, only three have been women. That’s less than 10 percent.

There were harbingers of the Pew poll results—starting on Day One with Rick Warren, Obama’s choice to deliver his inaugural invocation. There was also the selection of Alexia Kelley, founder of Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good to a major Department of Health and Human Services post. And there’s what Obama didn’t say in his health-care speech.

Also ignored in the health-care bills circulating are important women’s issues such as gender-based pricing and domestic violence as a pre-existing condition. The advocate for these issues could have been Valerie Jarrett, who chairs the White House Council on Women and Girls. When President Obama selected Jarrett in March, I wrote an op-ed for The Daily Beast in which I argued that we should give Jarrett a chance, even though she has a scant record on women’s issues. I received a lot of critical emails and blog traffic; mea culpa, my critics were right and I was wrong. Shortly after her selection, Jarrett took leave to focus on Chicago hosting the 2016 Olympics.