I don't really have anything to say about Palin's bizarre departure from the Alaska governorship other than that it confirms my general opinion of her as a loon who's not fit to govern anything.
I do, however, take issue with new Times columnist Ross Douthat's portrayal of Palin as a small-d democratic foil to the "elite" Obama-
Palin’s popularity has as much to do with class as it does with ideology. In this sense, she really is the perfect foil for Barack Obama. Our president represents the meritocratic ideal — that anyone, from any background, can grow up to attend Columbia and Harvard Law School and become a great American success story. But Sarah Palin represents the democratic ideal — that anyone can grow up to be a great success story without graduating from Columbia and Harvard.
Here are lessons of the Sarah Palin experience, for any aspiring politician who shares her background and her sex. Your children will go through the tabloid wringer. Your religion will be mocked and misrepresented. Your political record will be distorted, to better parody your family and your faith. (And no, gentle reader, Palin did not insist on abstinence-only sex education, slash funds for special-needs children or inject creationism into public schools.)
Male commentators will attack you for parading your children. Female commentators will attack you for not staying home with them. You’ll be sneered at for how you talk and how many colleges you attended. You’ll endure gibes about your “slutty” looks and your “white trash concupiscence,” while a prominent female academic declares that your “greatest hypocrisy” is the “pretense” that you’re a woman. And eight months after the election, the professionals who pressed you into the service of a gimmicky, dreary, idea-free campaign will still be blaming you for their defeat.
All of this had something to do with ordinary partisan politics. But it had everything to do with Palin’s gender and her social class.
I'll first note that plenty of female candidates (Hillary, Liddy Dole, Gerry Ferraro) have made it through presidential campaigns without having their children paraded through the tabloids- largely because they had selling points beyond "I didn't abort the special needs child." I'll also note that basically whenever the kids of high-profile politicians do stupid things, they end up in the tabloids.
As far as class goes, Matt Yglesias makes the point that one could reasonably compare Palin with Joe Biden. Like Palin, Biden was a graduate of less-than-first-tier schools (U. Delaware and Syracuse Law). Unlike Palin, neither of Biden's parents went to college. Biden never became rich, eschewed the fancy trappings of the Senate and continued to live in Delaware (and if the Northeast has an Alaska, it's Delaware).
Biden managed to avoid being labeled as stupid and trashy not by dint of his superior social class, but by being generally well informed and appearing to be a legitimate vice presidential candidate. You could say the same about Lyndon Johnson (graduate of Southwest Texas State Teachers' College) or Harry Truman (no college)- regular guys without elite east-coast credentials who succeeded by being smart and tough.
Douthat's article does a disservice to women and to the non-elite-school class (which I imagine Douthat knows a lot about from his time at Hamden Hall, a private Connecticut high school, or maybe from reporting that he did on them while writing for the Harvard Crimson). Palin's problems with the press came from her being an unprepared joke of a candidate- not because she was a woman or because she didn't graduate from Yale.
No comments:
Post a Comment