The New Model for Female Politicians
By Betsy NewmarkDaniel Henninger writes how Sarah Palin is a threat to the traditional model of a female politician. She breaks the old feminist model.
For starters, a lot of women voters don't live in New York, Boston, L.A. or San Francisco. Maybe Sarah Palin from Wasilla is a lot closer to the way many women today see themselves than the standard feminist model. Gloria Steinem, one of the many mothers of that ideal, is 74. Sarah Palin is 44. Times change.Whether there are enough women of this new model to help McCain is the question. But remember, she doesn't have to win over all the women's vote for McCain. She just has to steal away a few percentage points from Obama's support. And to get those votes in those crucial swing states.
Many younger women didn't learn what it means to be an achieving woman from dormitory feminism. She didn't abandon her hometown for the big city. She stayed home, had babies, helped her snowmobiling husband with his commercial fishing business and with him, tried to assemble a life.
She got into politics in Wasilla with zero connections -- no famous father, no financing husband, no mentor, nothing. She got elected mayor. She got into politics to improve her community, not to launch herself on some career path she had figured out while in college.
Then came the interesting part. Under the standard model, you deploy your superb IQ to maneuver upward around the oppressors. Sarah Jock, learning her self-discipline in such weird pursuits as morning moose-hunts with her dad, ran at the system. Doing something few women and no males would do, she went after the men who run Alaska's inbred politics, the machine. And cleaned their clocks. The people elected her governor.
I asked a number of women this week to account for Sarah Palin's sudden appeal. Here are the common threads.
The angry woman-as-victim drives them nuts. They hate victimology. As one woman said, "The point is that across the ages women have been doing pretty much what Sarah Palin has been doing: bearing children, feeding families, bringing in an income, working to improve their communities."
Another woman said, "Her story reflects a more normal reality" of active women; "the harder you work, the luckier you get." Hillary Clinton still plays the victim card. Sarah Palin gives off no victim vibes. These women mentioned her grit, determination and character.
They also said the Roe v. Wade litmus test has become too knee-jerk. Simply writing off Sarah Palin as "pro-life" caricatures pregnancy and motherhood.
Let's stipulate that not all "liberal" women share the Roe-dominated test of which women in public life get a pass and which are shunned. But this notion of sisterhood as a rules-based club is the public face of the feminist message, and in politics message is all -- until it no longer makes sense.
Sarah Palin looks like the old model's first real political challenge. They will be gunning for her. Good luck with that.
I suspect that lines like this will go a long way to reminding women voters in those states that Obama is the one who just doesn't get it.
The media and Democrats will come to regret all the piling on they did with their attacks on Sarah Palin for the past few days. All they did was increase people's interest in hearing her for themselves. And now they have. And that's why the liberals are worried now. Andrew Coyne at Macleans, no conservative organ, finds a parallel that won't comfort the Democrats.
Before I became governor of the great state of Alaska, I was mayor of my hometown.And congratulations to Jim Geraghty who suggested the line being played over and over today comparing a small-town mayor to a community organizer except with responsibility.
And since our opponents in this presidential election seem to look down on that experience, let me explain to them what the job involves.
I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a "community organizer," except that you have actual responsibilities. I might add that in small towns, we don't quite know what to make of a candidate who lavishes praise on working people when they are listening, and then talks about how bitterly they cling to their religion and guns when those people aren't listening.
We tend to prefer candidates who don't talk about us one way in Scranton and another way in San Francisco.
The media and Democrats will come to regret all the piling on they did with their attacks on Sarah Palin for the past few days. All they did was increase people's interest in hearing her for themselves. And now they have. And that's why the liberals are worried now. Andrew Coyne at Macleans, no conservative organ, finds a parallel that won't comfort the Democrats.
Her critics in the media and in the opposition may regret having piled on quite so enthusiastically, and with so little heed for who they hurt -- or angered. Watching the tumultuous, ecstatic reaction in the hall, I was reminded of the famous words of the Admiral Yamamoto after Pearl Harbour: "I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant, and fill him with a terrible resolve."