There's Something About Sarah

Tough-talking and all-American down to her hunting rifle and photogenic family, Sarah Palin has galvanized the Republican Party since John McCain selected her as his running mate. Author May-lee Chai sizes up the woman who would be vice president.

 
Oh, the heartache. This was the year Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton famously put 18 million cracks in the glass ceiling that has kept women from attaining the presidency of the United States. Regardless of whether they voted for Senator Clinton in the primaries, most Americans could agree she came across as a very knowledgeable and capable candidate.

Whereas polls had shown many Americans doubted whether a woman was “strong enough” to be Commander-in-Chief before Clinton’s historic bid for the presidency, her tough-as-nails campaign and take-no-prisoners debate style left the nation with little doubt that a woman could indeed be tough enough.

From the Queens Elizabeth (I and II) to Margaret Thatcher, Corazón Aquino, Golda Meir, Benazir Bhutto and on and on, women around the world have proved that they can lead their nations. Just not in the United States.

But after Clinton’s historic run, it seemed that gender was not going to be the deal breaker in American politics anymore.

Then came Sarah Palin.

Here was a complete mystery candidate whom most Americans had never heard of suddenly elevated to the number two spot on the Republican ticket.

The first reaction: Sarah who?

Newscasters had to scramble to find out how to pronounce her last name. It took even longer to find any information on her mere two years as governor of Alaska, a state ranked 47^th in terms of population. Her previous experience was as mayor of the tiny town of Wasilla, population 7,000. It seemed a rather thin résumé, but pundits who had first denigrated Senator Barack Obama as a political novice were more cautious this time. Who knew? Maybe this woman was brilliant, too.

And so Governor Sarah, as she’s known back in Alaska, was given a wide pass in her opening days on the Republican ticket.

The self-described hockey mom talked about reforming government, opposing pork barrel politics and stamping out corruption.

Well, that sounded nice enough. Who wasn’t for all that? Excited Republican women began flocking to McCain events, the media talking heads proclaimed a new political star and evangelicals thanked God for a “real” conservative on the ticket.

Yet I couldn’t quite feel the thrill that the pundits said I ought to about a possible historic Palin vice presidency. Something seemed oddly amiss.

In the beginning, I wondered if it wasn’t just the accent – a voice so nasal that even other Americans cringe at how wretched our accent can sound. Or the aesthetic. Forget the jokes about Hillary Clinton’s seemingly endless supply of identical pantsuits: Sarah Palin dresses like the Anti-Clinton. In fact, she dresses like no woman I’ve seen in my life. She dresses like women I’ve seen in my parents’ photo albums, women in beehives and high heels from the 1950s and early 60s.

I hated to admit that I could be so shallow but something about Sarah Palin’s evocation of pre-Civil Rights Era America freaked me out. Very little in American politics is unscripted, and I wondered what this retro-image was supposed to be projecting. Subservience? Nostalgia? Who knows?

It was hard to tell from her scripted speeches what she really stood for, especially since she gave only one actual interview in her first two weeks on the campaign trail. But then the interview was broadcast, and was it ever a doozy. As foreign policy experience, she actually cited her ability to see Russia from her home state of Alaska. This was not a joke. She did not know what the Bush Doctrine was – the policy of pre-emptive war against another nation that had not first attacked the U.S. – but said she supported it anyway.

She tried to clarify what she’d meant when she told her church that the War in Iraq was a “mission from God” by quoting Abraham Lincoln. But Lincoln has nothing to do with the Iraq War, and she sure wasn’t quoting him on the tape that ran of her speaking before her Assemblies of God congregation.

Then slowly, in drips and dribbles, more information about Palin came out. Alaska is part of the United States, but at times like this, it seemed as though our 49^th state might well have been a foreign nation as it took our journalists so long to get us information about her governing record. At last, contradiction after contradiction came forth.

Palin famously said during the Republican National Convention, on live television, that she had opposed the infamous “Bridge to Nowhere”, a federally funded project that would build a tiny bridge in Alaska for some $223 million dollars. But a video of her 2006 gubernatorial campaign showed that Palin actually had supported the bridge project, and when the funding was awarded but the project rejected by Alaskan citizens, she kept the funds for Alaska and used them for other projects.

Other scandals erupted: Alaskans claimed she had fired the state’s public safety commissioner because he refused to dismiss a state trooper who had been involved in a messy divorce from her own sister. Palin refused to cooperate in the Alaska state legislature’s investigation into the dismissal. She refused more media interviews. She continued her scripted speeches. Her church was revealed to be homophobic, espousing a policy called “Pray the Gay Away”. She opposed abortions even in the case of incest and rape. She was using her 17-year-old daughter’s pregnancy as a campaign plug for family values, even though the soon-to-be bridegroom had posted on his MySpace page “I don’t want any kids” just weeks before Sarah Palin’s pick as VP candidate put him into the national spotlight. (His MySpace page has since been taken down.)

Sadly, I realized Senator John McCain had not chosen Gov. Palin because she had an outstanding record of leadership. It’s hard to know what was going through his head. She has certainly galvanized the hard-core fundamentalist Christian Right in America, but polls from CNN to NPR show that Sarah Palin is more popular with Republican men than with women, and she is abysmally unpopular with single women in general.

As an American woman, I can’t feel pride that a woman is finally (potentially) a heartbeat away from becoming our president. Instead, I think I now know how white men must feel when they look at George W. Bush, our uniquely unpopular president. I feel horrified.

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