Going Rouge (15 page)

Sarah’s Steel Ones

Amy Alexander

Since the Republican vice presidential candidate’s approval rating appears to be immune to facts—notably, that she is entirely unprepared to hold the second-highest office in the land—let’s admit that ballsiness is an essential part of Sarah Palin’s “relatability.”

Nation
columnist Patricia J. Williams examined the “frontierswoman” aspect of Palin’s profile, and astutely took apart the reasons why that can-do, gun-toting, Annie Oakley image so quickly and firmly grabbed hold of GOP convention delegates and the press. In record time, the number of references to Palin as a g-droppin’, huntin’, fishin’ Wal-Mart Mom, has transported us back to the era of Manifest Destiny, when America‘s Western expansion (and a hankerin’ for gold) required women to man up or die.

This does have some appeal, and maybe it is time we stop fretting about Palin’s hypocrisy and contradictions and acknowledge the positive part of her persona. It does exist, and recognizing it does not require you to dismiss her obvious shortcomings.

As Williams points out, there are probably more than a few of us who drift off, from time to time, on the delicious fantasy of what it would feel like to draw down with shotgun on the misbehaving men in our lives. We don’t know if Palin has ever done such a thing, but it appears she sure as hell could. I have to own up to the part of me that admires that. After watching her with Gibson, it’s safe to say that it took a spine of titanium to stay upright in that chair as “Charlie” scowled at her over the top of his reading glasses: I, too, am a graduate of a state university and instantly recognized Palin’s ginned-up bravado and cramming-before-finals anxiety. Watching her struggle to stay on message—she never did answer the question of whether it is OK for U.S. forces to launch raids in Pakistan without that government’s knowledge or approval—a small part of me was rooting for her to pull it off. Does that qualify as situational ethics on my part? I don’t know. But I do know that by over-intellectualizing this steeliness factor, and by underestimating its power to sway voters, we are not being true to our cultural history.

It is no accident that in the last century, the women authors who changed the literary game, and the heroines they created, are all of the ballsy variety—Zora Neale Hurston, Eudora Welty, Margaret Mitchell, Maya Angelou. Fiction writers and journalists are mere scribblers of history, while politicians are the high-stakes actors in our national drama. But I think we risk throwing shade across a part of our political future by failing to acknowledge the value of Sarah Palin’s abundant moxie.

Is this critique sexist? Should I turn in my feminist card? I’m happy to entertain any charges of sexism that may result from my deconstruction of the catnip part of the Palin aesthetic. Yes, we’re entering the rabbit hole of the “Why is it OK for blacks to call each other the N-word but not OK for whites?” territory of feminist critique, but I’ve got thick skin, and I am also consistent: I’m black, I don’t call other blacks the N-word, and I don’t want other blacks to use that word, either. I’m a woman who doesn’t call other women the B-word, and I will call out anyone who is foolish enough to direct either of those words at me.

As for feminist street cred, eh: I’m more concerned with being scrupulous—and pragmatic—enough to recognize the whirl of ambiguities that make humans so interesting. Dick Cheney manages to love his lesbian daughter, which is good. And yes, the self-disciplined Condoleezza Rice is an appropriate role model for black girls. Plus, as we learned from the Hillary Clinton presidential candidacy, charges of sexism can be the red herring in a procedural crime drama worthy of P. D. James.

Progressives and feminists who sneer at women unwilling to separate that stimulus-response “I heart ballsy women!” from the business at hand—“Does she have the intellect and experience to be vice president?”—are spinning their wheels. They also conveniently overlook the possibility that Palin’s raw ambition is very close to the self-confidence we want to encourage in our daughters. Sarah Palin is a strong woman, and that is good. Her politics, and what they may lead her to create for our democracy... not so much.

Sarah Palin, Mean Girl

Linda Hirshman

I have been feeling really guilty about not liking Sarah Palin. She’s independent, her husband helps raise the kids, she’s worked most of her life. I should
luv
her. But the minute she minced on stage in St. Louis Thursday, with her shoulder-length hair and stiletto heels, I realized why I don’t: she’s the
Rules
Girl.

Remember
The Rules: Time-Tested Secrets for Capturing the Heart of Mr. Right
, Ellen Fein and Sherry Schneider’s explosively controversial 1995 book that upended thirty years of feminist teaching about dating? Forget all that equality and intelligence stuff,
The Rules
advised. Who wants to be Hillary Clinton? Men are simple, attracted to sexual symbols and bright, shiny objects. If you want them, they argued, you must sport long hair and wear sexy, attention-getting clothes. The suit Palin wore for the debate was some amazingly iridescent material, and she sported an eye-popping sparkly rhinestone flag pin. The governor as the It Girl of the ’90s singles scene.

As the capital-letter
Rules
recommend, Palin knows she must Never Leave the House without Makeup. And, so far in this campaign, she has scrupulously followed the
Rules
for dealing with mainstream-media suitors: Rarely Return Their Calls. Always End the Date First. Never Make a Date for Saturday Night after a Wednesday Date. Never Make a Date for
Meet the Press
At All.

Palin follows all the
Rules
most indigestible to feminists. Let Him Take the Lead. (“Bush Doctrine? In what respect, Charlie?”) Never Tell Him What to Do or Try to Change Him. (John McCain: “Governor Palin and I agree that you don’t announce that you’re going to attack another country.” Palin: “Well, as Senator McCain is suggesting here, also, never would our administration get out there and show our cards to terrorists, in this case, to enemies and let them know what the game plan was, not when that could ultimately adversely affect a plan to keep America secure.”)

The Rules
provides a perfect model for GOP media prep. How a
Rules
Girl acts does not have to reflect what she really believes—or even what she knows, so long as it’s effective with the target audience. As with all such disconnected systems, a practitioner must keep
The Rules
nearby for reference. If you watch the video of Thursday’s debate, you’ll see that Palin constantly consulted her notecards. Fein and Schneider recommend keeping a copy of their book on the bedside table, hidden from view but close enough to consult if you’re tempted to, for example, linger on a phone call with a boyfriend beyond the prescribed time.

The danger is, of course, when a situation arises for which the notecards do not have an answer. When Gwen Ifill asked a question Palin did not have a notecard answer for—whether she agreed with Vice President Cheney’s egregiously overreaching interpretation of the constitutional role of the vice president—the answer was ladled up straight from the Palin linguistic smorgasbord:

“Well, our founding fathers were very wise there in allowing through the Constitution much flexibility there in the office of the vice president. And we will do what is best for the American people in tapping into that position and ushering in an agenda that is supportive and cooperative with the president’s agenda in that position. Yeah, so I do agree with him that we have a lot of flexibility in there, and we’ll do what we have to do to administer very appropriately the plans that are needed for this nation. And it is my executive experience that is partly to be attributed to my pick as VP with McCain, not only as a governor, but earlier on as a mayor, as an oil and gas regulator, as a business owner. It is those years of experience on an executive level that will be put to good use in the White House, also.”

In its day,
The Rules
was a best seller on the
New York Times
self-help list. But using it as a guide for political behavior is a dangerous game in 2008. By setting Palin up as the
Rules
Girl—the gorgeous, fecund non-Hillary, equipped with all the right answers—Republicans forget that
The Rules
is a manual for how to attract men.

But for decades, the voting-age population has been predominantly female: Women vote at a greater rate and usually a little differently from men. Despite all the talk of disaffected Hillary supporters crossing over to the GOP after Obama’s nomination, serious pollsters found no such thing. Some pundits say Palin did fine last night, but thanks to CNN, we were able to test in real time exactly how the Palin performance played with women voters. CNN provided a little chart that shows how the debaters were faring with a focus group of independent voters from the swing state of Ohio. On the chart, the men’s reactions show up in green; women’s, in orange. Guess what? Palin really tanked among those women. There were times when the line showing the women’s disapproval of her answers sank so low it threatened to leap off the screen and start crawling down the wall behind the TV. I’m imagining those Ohio independents as having a vivid picture of a fully made-up, dimpled, winking woman trying to work the crowd from her tattered copy of
The Rules
.

In the weeks ahead, expect Palin to keep following
The Rules
to be the bright, shiny object McCain needs in his charisma-challenged campaign. No matter how well she does this, however, it may not make a bit of difference. It pains me to say this, but in 2001, just as the book’s happily married, perfectly coiffed, complaisant co-author Ellen Fein was releasing a sequel,
The Rules for a Happy Marriage
, her husband left her.

The “Bitch” and the “Ditz”

Amanda Fortini

In the past few weeks, Sarah Palin has been variously described as a diva who engaged in paperwork-throwing tantrums, a shopaholic who spent $150,000 on clothing, a seductress who provocatively welcomed staffers while wearing only a towel, and a “whack-job”—contemporary code for hysteric. Worse, she was accused by a suspiciously gleeful Fox News reporter named Carl Cameron of not knowing Africa was a continent, of being unable to name the members of NAFTA, indeed of being unable to name the countries of North America at all. (“But she can be tutored,” Bill O’Reilly told Cameron, as though speaking of a small child.) More significant than the dubious origins of these leaks, or the fact that the campaign that cried “sexism” at every criticism of its vice presidential nominee was engaging in its own misogynistic warfare, is the fact that all of the allegations were so believable. After all, Palin had earned herself a reputation as, in the words of one Fox News blogger, “something of a policy ditz.”

It’s hard to get too worked up on Palin’s behalf, of course; she was complicit in her crucifixion. But it is disappointing to watch what some have called the “year of the woman” come to such an embarrassing conclusion. This was an election cycle in which candidates pandered to female voters, newsweeklies tried to figure out “what women want,” and Hillary Clinton garnered 18 million votes toward winning the Democratic nomination. The assumption was that these “18 million cracks in the highest glass ceiling,” as Clinton put it, would advance the prospects of female achievement and gender equality. It hasn’t exactly worked out that way.

In the grand passion play that was this election, both Clinton and Palin came to represent—and, at times, reinforce—two of the most pernicious stereotypes that are applied to women: the bitch and the ditz. Clinton took the first label, even though she tried valiantly, some would say misguidedly, to run a campaign that ignored gender until the very end. “Now, I’m not running because I’m a woman,” she would say. “I’m running because I think I’m the best-qualified and experienced person to hit the ground running.” She was highly competent, serious, diligent, prepared (sometimes overly so)—a woman who cloaked her femininity in hawkishness and pantsuits. But she had, to use an unfortunate term, likability issues, and she inspired in her detractors an upwelling of sexist animus: She was likened to Tracy Flick for her irritating entitlement, to Lady Macbeth for her boundless ambition. She was a grind, scold, harpy, shrew, priss, teacher’s pet, killjoy—you get the idea. She was repeatedly called a bitch (as in: “How do we beat the…”) and a buster of balls. Tucker Carlson deemed her “castrating, overbearing, and scary” and said, memorably, “Every time I hear Hillary Clinton speak, I involuntarily cross my legs.”

Career women, especially those of a certain age, recognized themselves in Clinton and the reactions she provoked. “Maybe what bothers me most is that people say Hillary is a bitch,” said Tina Fey in her now-famous “Bitch Is the New Black” skit. “Let me say something about that: Yeah, she is. So am I... You know what? Bitches get stuff done.” At least being called a bitch implies power. As bad as Clinton’s treatment was, the McCain campaign’s cynical decision to put a woman—any woman—on the ticket was worse for the havoc it would wreak on gender politics. It was far more destructive, we would learn, for a woman to be labeled a fool.

When Sarah Palin first stepped onto the national stage, I was, like many women, intrigued by her. Here was a woman who—even if you didn’t agree with her politics—seemed to have achieved what so many of us were struggling for: an enviable balance between career and family. She was “a brisk, glam multitasker,” to quote the
Observer
’s Doree Shafrir, with a good-natured stay-at-home husband at her side and several adorable young children in tow. She was running a state and breast-feeding a newborn and yet, amazingly, did not seem exhausted. There was something inspiring about seeing a woman so at ease with her choices, even as both liberal and conservative critics chided her for running for vice president when her family needed her. Politics aside, when, at the convention, she delivered a politically deft speech like a pro, it was pleasing to witness the first woman on a Republican ticket perform so well.

Of course, the myth of Sarah Palin unraveled almost as quickly as it was spun. By now, her bizarre filibustering, discomfiting blank stares, weird locutions, and general tendency to trip over herself verbally are familiar. First, there was the painful Charles Gibson interview, in which Palin adopted a Toastmasters-style technique of repeating her interlocutor’s name in a vain attempt to sound authoritative. Then Katie Couric, with a newfound air of gravitas, smothered Palin with her simple questions and soothing manner: Palin appeared stunningly uninformed, lacking a basic fluency in foreign policy and economic theory. Even if she had frozen up out of nervousness, or fell into the category of smart-but-inarticulate, it was still unacceptable that she couldn’t recall Supreme Court decisions she disagreed with or name a single periodical she reads.
Time
?
Newsweek
? Hello?

Palin was recast as the charmer, the glider, the dim beauty queen, the kind of woman who floats along on a little luck and the favor of men. In the
New Yorker
, Jane Mayer recounted how a handful of conservative Washington thinkers became besotted with Palin during a trip to Alaska and subsequently began to promote her in Washington:
National Review
’s Jay Nordlinger described the governor as “a former beauty-pageant contestant, and a real honey, too”; Bill Kristol called her “my heartthrob”; and Fred Barnes noted she was “exceptionally pretty.” While it’s obviously not Palin’s fault that men find her attractive, it is fair to criticize her for campaigning on a platform of charm rather than substance. In what Michelle Goldberg called a “brazen attempt to flirt [her] way into the good graces of the voting public,” she waved and winked and smiled—even during the debate—and called herself “just your average hockey mom.” (Never mind that it’s impossible to imagine a male candidate mentioning fatherhood as the source of his readiness to be the nation’s second-in-command.) Her running mate called her “a direct counterpoint to the liberal feminist agenda for America,” and her “Joe Six-Pack” fans seemed to appreciate her nonthreatening approach. To quote a former truck driver named Larry Hawkins who was interviewed by the
New York Times
at a Palin rally: “They bear us children, they risk their lives to give us birth, so maybe it’s time we let a woman lead us.”

It was enough to incense those of us who related to Hillary Clinton and her plight. “What’s infuriating, and perhaps rage-inducing, about Palin, is that she has always embodied that perfectly pleasing female archetype,” Jessica Grose wrote on Jezebel, in a post titled “Why Sarah Palin Incites Near-Violent Rage in Normally Reasonable Women.” Palin had taken a match and set fire to our meritocratic notions that hard work and accumulated experience would be rewarded. “As has been known to happen in less exalted workplaces,” Katha Pollitt wrote, “Palin got the promotion because the boss just liked her.” Her blithe ignorance extended from foreign policy to the symbolic value of her candidacy. By stepping into the spotlight unprepared, Palin reinforced some of the most damaging and sexist ideas of all: that women are undisciplined in their thinking; that we are distracted by domestic concerns or frivolous pursuits like shopping; that we are not smart enough, or not serious enough, for the important jobs.

In a rare moment of sympathy for Palin, Judith Warner, writing in the
New York Times
, noted that Palin’s admirers must “know she can’t possibly do it all—the kids, the special-needs baby, the big job, the big conversations with foreign leaders. And neither could they.” But many women do manage to do it all, or pretty close to all. They at least manage to come prepared for the big conversations and the critical meetings, no matter what they have going on at home. “Do we have to drag out a list of women who miraculously have found a way to balance many of these factors—Hillary Clinton? Nancy Pelosi? Michelle Bachelet?—and could still explain the Bush Doctrine without breaking out in hives?” wrote Rebecca Traister in Salon. Why then must Palin’s operatic failure be the example that leaves a lasting imprint?

And so, here we are, nearly two years after Hillary Clinton declared her candidacy. While it’s true that societal change comes in fits and starts and the Clinton campaign went a long way toward helping voters imagine a female commander in chief, I can’t help but think that our historic step forward was followed by more than a few in the opposite direction.

In August, after Clinton had dropped out of the race but before Palin was selected as the vice presidential nominee, the Pew Research Center published a study on gender and leadership. A remarkable 69 percent of respondents believed that men and women made equally good leaders. In fact, women were rated equal to or better than men in seven of eight “leadership traits,” such as honesty, intelligence, ambition, creativity, compassion—the only quality on which men scored higher was decisiveness.

Two months later, when voters were asked to rate the leadership ability of one particular woman, the results were just as striking. According to exit polls, 60 percent of voters thought Palin was not qualified to be president if necessary. It’s true that Sarah Palin is only one woman, and we’ve seen male candidates of questionable readiness, like the oft-mentioned Dan Quayle, and even presidents of questionable intelligence, such as George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan, whom Clark Clifford once called “an amiable dunce.” But because so few women are present at the highest levels of government, they carry the burden of representing their gender more so than men. In politics as in business, an unqualified woman does more damage than no women at all. She serves to fortify the stereotypes that the next woman will have to surmount.

In the end, women can take pride in the fact that we helped break another set of retrograde stereotypes and prejudices with the election of Barack Obama. Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson notes that “for the first time since enfranchisement, [women] voted in greater numbers, and more progressively, than men,” favoring Obama by a 13 percent margin, while men were almost evenly split. In doing so, we selected a candidate whose views on issues like health care and equal pay and reproductive rights align with our interests.

But among the darker revelations of this election is the fact that the vise-grip of female stereotypes remains suffocatingly tight. On the national political stage and in office buildings across the country, women regularly find themselves divided into dualities that are the modern equivalent of the Madonna-whore complex: the hard-ass or the lightweight; the battle-ax or the bubblehead; the serious, pursed-lipped shrew or the silly, ineffectual girl. It is exceedingly difficult to sidestep this trap. Michelle Obama began the campaign as a bold, outspoken woman with a career of her own, and she was called a hard-ass. Now, as she prepares to move into the White House, she appears poised to recede into a fifties-era role of “mom in chief.” It will be heartbreaking if, in an effort to avoid the kind of criticism that followed Hillary Clinton, the first lady is reduced to a lightweight.

Many will say we’ve come a long way this year. The truth is we have a long way to go.