- The Observer, Sunday September 7 2008
Not so long ago, Britain and the rest of Europe were rejoicing in America’s presidential choice of Barack Obama versus John McCain. The hated George W Bush would be gone and a sensible, smart leader would inhabit the White House again – whoever won. The Economist put McCain and Obama on its cover and declared, ‘This is the most impressive choice America has had for a very long time.’ Praise the Lord.
Then along came Sarah Palin, the lightly travelled Christian evangelical McCain chose as his running mate. Much has been made of the soap-operatic side of the governor of Alaska: the caribou-hunting, mooseburger-eating mother-of-five who drives herself to work, her beauty queen past, her pregnant, unwed 17-year-old daughter. What really matters is what she believes in and why McCain selected her. On both counts, much of the world outside America will not be pleased.
Palin describes herself and her family as ‘typical’. But to most of the planet, she’s an exotic. She’s a fundamentalist Christian. She advocated teaching creationism alongside evolution in Alaska’s schools. Her right-to-life convictions extend to stem cell research, which she opposes.
She’s opposed to gay marriage. She’s about as right as a Republican can get. She does not believe human behaviour is responsible for global warming. She supports home schooling and other alternatives to traditional state education. She’s anti-gun control; for example, she supports ending the ban on handguns that has existed in Washington DC for more than three decades.
Palin has said she would not force her views on others. Indeed, she kept a campaign pledge not to push as governor for mandatory inclusion of creationism in her state’s school curriculum. But she cannot pretend always to divorce her personal views from matters of state and governance. In praying that a natural gas pipeline would be built in Alaska, she used traditional evangelical language. She believes the US mission in Iraq is a ‘task that is from God’.
The McCain who chose Palin is not the McCain familiar to many of us outside the US. The McCain we know is a worldly, well-informed, straight-talking Republican who’s a likeable fixture at policy talking shops in London and Berlin, a man at ease with men and women of international affairs across the world. His views do not always coincide with his chums in world capitals – eg, his hawkishness on Iraq – but he’s long been seen as a safe and pragmatic pair of hands on big issues like trade (he’s a free trader, more so than Obama) and the environment (unlike Palin, he accepts that human behaviour is a contributor to climate change).
The McCain who chose Palin is someone who found himself in a political panic. In the weeks before the Democratic national convention, the polls put Obama and McCain head to head. Predictably, Obama got a boost after the Democratic lovefest in Denver. But even discounting that, at a time of widespread disaffection with Bush and the Republican party more generally, the inertia of public opinion heading into an election seemed to favour Obama. The natural inclination of many of McCai n’s advisers was to turn to the base, the far right wing of the party, much of it evangelical, whose money, hard work and get-out-the-vote fervour could make a big difference on 4 November.
Under other circumstances, McCain might have gone for somebody more like himself – Senator Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, a pro-Iraq war Democrat-turned-independent, or former Pennsylvania governor Tom Ridge, chosen by Bush to be the first director of the Office of Homeland Security after 9/11. But Lieberman, who is Jewish, and Ridge, a Catholic, are supporters of abortion rights. McCain occupies a kind of middle ground: he’s in favour of overturning Roe versus Wade, the Supreme Court decision upholding a woman’s right to abortion, but he’s against prosecuting women who have abortions. If how to appeal to the base was the question, neither Lieberman nor Ridge was the answer.
Palin was. Her inexperience is easily ridiculed, especially when Cindy McCain, John’s wife, comes along and tries to portray Palin as a keen Kremlinologist (‘Remember: Alaska is the closest part of our continent to Russia. So, it’s not as if she doesn’t understand what’s at stake.’) Palin’s message to the world is much like the one she delivered last Wednesday to her detractors in America: ‘Here’s a little news flash for all those reporters and commentators: I’m not going to Washington to seek their good opinion – I’m going to Washington to serve the people of this country.’
The message of her candidacy, the message of McCain’s choice, is equally plain. America’s religious right is back. In fact, despite all the wishful thinking riding on the departure of Bush, the religious right never really went away.
· Stryker McGuire is a contributing editor of ‘Newsweek’ and editor of ‘International Quarterly’.
Peace and Justice Post 
The F-card won’t wash
September 13, 2008Sarah Palin is disastrous for women’s rights, no matter how Republicans try to frame her as a feminist
Jessica Valenti | The Guardian, Friday September 12 2008
The New York Post calls her “a feminist dream”. National Public Radio asks if she’s the “new face of feminism”. And the Wall Street Journal, ever subtle, calls it “Sarah Palin Feminism”. I call it well-spun garbage. (Yes, I’d even call it a pig in lipstick.) It seems you can’t open a newspaper or turn on the television without running across a piece about how the Republican vice-presidential candidate, Sarah Palin, is not just a feminist, but the feminist – a sign that all is right in the US when it comes to gender equality. (Turn in those Birkenstocks and picket signs, gals!)
Palin’s conservative cohorts are claiming her candidacy as a win for women and proof that it’s Republicans who are the real agents of change. After all, what more could American women want in a vice-presidential candidate than a well-coiffed “hockey mom”?
Never mind that Palin talks about her teen daughter’s decision to keep her child while awaiting the chance to take that choice away from American women. Don’t worry about how Palin cut funding for a transitional home for teenage mothers. And forget that, under Palin’s mayoralty, women in Wasilla, Alaska, were forced to pay for their own rape kits to the tune of up to $1,200.
We’re not supposed to care about these issues because – say Republicans – we should just be happy that there’s a woman on the ticket. The McCain campaign is cynically trying to recreate the excitement that surrounded Hillary Clinton’s candidacy, believing that all women want is … another woman.
Ann Friedman, deputy editor of the American Prospect, wrote: “In picking Palin, Republicans are lending credence to the sexist assumption that women voters are too stupid to investigate or care about the issues, and merely want to vote for someone who looks like them … McCain has turned the idea of the first woman in the White House from a true moment of change to an empty pander.”
What’s worse is conservatives can’t understand why women aren’t lining up to thank them. In fact, the same people who moaned that women – those darn feminists, especially – were only supporting Hillary because of her gender are now screaming to the rafters because they’re not supporting Palin for the same reason. That’s what makes Republicans pulling the feminist card that much more insulting – the stunning hypocrisy. The McCain touting himself as the person who will put a woman in the White House is the same man who joked that Chelsea Clinton is “so ugly” because “her father is Janet Reno”.
And despite the talk about being the party of change, appropriating feminist symbols – such as at a Pennsylvania rally, where people held up signs of Rosie the Riveter with Palin’s face – and propping up anti-feminist women as trailblazers is typical of the Republicans.
Organisations such as the Independent Women’s Forum and Concerned Women for America, who call themselves the “real” feminists while fighting against things such as equal pay and legislation to combat violence against women, have been around (and funded by conservatives) for years. Their brand of feminism means benefiting from the gains of the women’s movement while striving to keep other women down – all for a patriarchal pat on the head. Sound familiar?
As the feminist writer Rebecca Traister says: “Palin’s femininity is one that is recognisable to most women: she’s the kind of broad who speaks on behalf of other broads but appears not to like them very much … It’s like some dystopian future … feminism without any feminists.”
The good news is, this twisted homage to feminism means conservatives must recognise it as a force in American politics – why spend so much time framing Palin as feminist if we’re all just a bunch of hairy man-haters? The bad news, however, trumps all. If this campaign is successful, American women will suffer. We’ll be under the thumb of yet another administration that thinks nothing of rolling back women’s rights.
No matter how many times feminists point out the hypocrisy of Republicans pulling the F-card, however, the bigger truth is that it’s not Palin’s anti-feminist bona fides alone that matter. While Palin is bad for women’s rights, she’s terrible for America. In addition to being investigated by her own legislature for abuse of power, she is also reported to have asked a librarian about the process for banning books in Wasilla, doesn’t support sex education, and has made lying about her record unusually central to her candidacy – even for a politician. These are big warning signs that cut across gender lines.
So while the McCain campaign holds Palin up as a shining example of feminism in action, let’s not forget the truth about who’s doing the spinning and what they’re selling. Because the last thing America needs is another corrupt and lying politician – man or woman.
· Jessica Valenti, founder of the Feministing website, is the author of Full Frontal Feminism
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Tags:Alaska, feminism, hockey mom, McCain, Republicans, Sara Palin
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