A Great Leap for Women?
By LisaB on September 12, 2008 at 5:00 PM in Current Affairs
“It took Nixon to go to China.” Will it take Republicans to elect a woman?
A lot of current thinking on the nature of change, progress, and/or evolution centers around the idea that major steps forward are often accomplished in leaps. The notion of incremental progress that’s slow, deliberate and inexorable is losing ground in many sciences.
Perhaps we’d better add political science to that list. The Democrats have long been the party promising women that their concerns were the party’s concerns. The party also, by saying it supported women more than the Republicans, held out the carrot that women would rise within the party to a national ticket when one was sufficiently experienced and electable.
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Well, we know how that worked out. Whether Obama actually beat Clinton is arguable, due to all the questionable rulz, caucus shenanigans, delegate shopping and scorched earth race-baiting. What is not arguable is the utter misogyny on display throughout the primaries and now oozing into the GE.
So, what if the party that just jumps right in and elects the first woman on a national ticket is actually the Republican party? What if it’s the Republicans who make the leap and actually move us forward in how we see women in office??????
Would it really be ironic if the first female on a presidential ticket is a Republican or does it ultimately make more sense?
Camille Paglia, not a Republican by any stretch of the word, has an article at Salon detailing her reaction to the Sarah Palin choice and what it means for feminism. Very interesting stuff and worth the read.
After that extravaganza [Democratic convention, "Greek night"], marking the 40th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s epochal civil rights speech on the Washington Mall, I felt calmly confident that the Obama campaign was going to roll like a gorgeous juggernaut right over the puny, fossilized McCain. The next morning, it was as if the election were already over. No need to fret about American politics anymore this year. I had already turned with relief to other matters.
Pow! Wham! The Republicans unleashed a doozy — one of the most stunning surprises that I have ever witnessed in my adult life. By lunchtime, Obama’s triumph of the night before had been wiped right off the national radar screen. In a bold move I would never have thought him capable of, McCain introduced Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska as his pick for vice president. I had heard vaguely about Palin but had never heard her speak. I nearly fell out of my chair. It was like watching a boxing match or a quarter of hard-hitting football — or one of the great light-saber duels in “Star Wars.” . . . This woman turned out to be a tough, scrappy fighter with a mischievous sense of humor.
Conservative though she may be, I felt that Palin represented an explosion of a brand new style of muscular American feminism. At her startling debut on that day, she was combining male and female qualities in ways that I have never seen before. And she was somehow able to seem simultaneously reassuringly traditional and gung-ho futurist. In terms of redefining the persona for female authority and leadership, Palin has made the biggest step forward in feminism since Madonna channeled the dominatrix persona of high-glam Marlene Dietrich and rammed pro-sex, pro-beauty feminism down the throats of the prissy, victim-mongering, philistine feminist establishment.
——————–Over the Labor Day weekend, with most of the big enchiladas of the major media on vacation, the vacuum was filled with a hallucinatory hurricane in the leftist blogosphere, which unleashed a grotesquely lurid series of allegations, fantasies, half-truths and outright lies about Palin. What a tacky low in American politics — which has already caused a backlash that could damage Obama’s campaign. When liberals come off as childish, raving loonies, the right wing gains. I am still waiting for substantive evidence that Sarah Palin is a dangerous extremist. I am perfectly willing to be convinced, but right now, she seems to be merely an optimistic pragmatist like Ronald Reagan, someone who pays lip service to religious piety without being in the least wedded to it. I don’t see her arrival as portending the end of civil liberties or life as we know it.
———————-The witch-trial hysteria of the past two incendiary weeks unfortunately reveals a disturbing trend in the Democratic Party, which has worsened over the past decade. Democrats are quick to attack the religiosity of Republicans, but Democratic ideology itself seems to have become a secular substitute religion. Since when did Democrats become so judgmental and intolerant? Conservatives are demonized, with the universe polarized into a Manichaean battle of us versus them, good versus evil. Democrats are clinging to pat group opinions as if they were inflexible moral absolutes. The party is in peril if it cannot observe and listen and adapt to changing social circumstances.
I’ve gotten many emails and seen many articles and blogs about how “Palin is bad for women.” But I just don’t see it that way. Agree or disagree with her on issues, but I don’t see that she is BAD for women. How can Democrats, who had the chance to nominate a qualified woman and chose not to, say that Palin is “bad” for women? And could she really mess up things so badly that no other woman would EVER be elected? Really? I don’t buy that. Despite all their mess-ups, we keep electing men.
In an interview with Bill Moyers (see NQ article: Anybody Want a Stuffed Unity Jackass, Anybody?), Andrew Bacevich, author of The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism, said this:
. . . one of the great lies about American politics is that Democrats genuinely subscribe to a set of core convictions that make Democrats different from Republicans.
I think we’re finding out that the so-called Democratic values regarding the worth of women weren’t worth the water they were written on. Even if Hillary was not to be the nominee, the tactics used to attack her were completely retrograde and reflected deep-seated issues within the party about women in power. And the party is still trying to convince voters that Hillary was the problem and that Democrats would, in a heartbeat, nominate a woman (if one were readily available, but not this year and not even for VP).
If you believe that Democratic values around women are opposite those of Republicans, then Republicans would never nominate a woman or care what women think. Not being a Republican, I can’t say with authority what that party thinks about all women’s issues. But I can say that I think the Democratic positions were essentially lies. If it is true that neither party actually has a set of core values, then it’s only about power.
But it’s the Republicans who have a woman on the ticket.
If you’d like a brief run-down of media misogyny, here’s a NQ piece listing many media personalities saying things about a woman that would get them fired if said about an AA.
If you’d like a brief run-down of Democrats and misogyny, here’s another NQ piece by Rabble Rousing Rev Amy to read.
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