Going Rouge (22 page)

7/ GOING ROGUE

A Woman’s Right to Lose

The Sarah Palin Pity Party

Rebecca Traister

Is this the week that Democrats and Republicans join hands—to heap pity on poor Sarah Palin?

At the moment, all signs point to yes, as some strange bedfellows reveal that they have been feeling sorry for the vice presidential candidate ever since she stopped speaking without the help of a teleprompter. Conservative women like Kathleen Parker and Kathryn Jean Lopez are shuddering with sympathy as they realize that the candidate who thrilled them, just weeks ago, is not in shape for the big game. They’re not alone. The
New Republic
’s Christopher Orr feels that Palin has been misused by the team that tapped her. In the
New York Times
, Judith Warner feels for Sarah, too! And over at the
Atlantic
, Ta-Nehisi Coates empathizes with intelligence and nuance, making clear that he’s not expressing pity. Salon’s own Glenn Greenwald watched the Katie Couric interview and “actually felt sorry for Sarah Palin.” Even Amy Poehler, impersonating Katie Couric on last week’s
Saturday Night Live
, makes the joke that Palin’s cornered-animal ineptitude makes her “increasingly adorable.”

I guess I’m one cold dame, because while Palin provokes many unpleasant emotions in me, I just can’t seem to summon pity, affection, or remorse.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m just like all of the rest of you, part of the bipartisan jumble of viewers that keeps one hand poised above the mute button and the other over my eyes during Palin’s disastrous interviews. Like everyone else, I can barely take the waves of embarrassment that come with watching someone do something so badly. Roseanne Barr singing the national anthem, Sofia Coppola acting in
The Godfather: Part III
, Sarah Palin talking about Russia—they all create the same level of eyeball-squinching discomfort.

But just because I’m human, just because I can feel, just because I did say this weekend that I “almost feel sorry for her” doesn’t mean, when I consider the situation rationally, that I do. Yes, as a feminist, it sucks—hard—to watch a woman, no matter how much I hate her politics, unable to answer questions about her running mate during a television interview. And perhaps it’s because this experience pains me so much that I feel not sympathy but biting anger. At her, at John McCain, at the misogynistic political mash that has been made of what was otherwise a groundbreaking year for women in presidential politics.

In her “Poor Sarah” column, Warner writes of the wave of “self-recognition and sympathy [that] washed over” her when she saw a photo of Palin talking to Henry Kissinger. Palin—as “a woman fully aware that she was out of her league, scared out of her wits, hanging on for dear life”—apparently reminded Warner of herself. Wow. Putting aside the massively depressing implication that Warner recognizes this attitude because she believes it to be somehow written into the female condition, let’s consider that there are any number of women who could have been John McCain’s running mate—from Olympia Snowe to Christine Todd Whitman to Kay Bailey Hutchison to Elizabeth Dole to Condoleezza Rice—who would not have provoked this reaction. Democrats might well have been repulsed and infuriated by these women’s policy positions. But we would not have been sitting around worrying about how scared they looked.

In her piece, Warner diagnoses Palin with a case of “Impostor Syndrome,” positing that admirers who watched her sitting across from world leaders at the United Nations were recognizing that “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.” Seriously? Do we have to drag out a list of women who miraculously have found a way to manage to balance many of these factors—Hillary Clinton? Nancy Pelosi? Michelle Bachelet?—and could still explain the Bush Doctrine without breaking into hives? This is not breaking my heart. It is breaking my spirit.

The
Atlantic
’s Coates takes a far smarter, but ultimately still too gentle, approach to Palin in his blog. He writes, compassionately, “There are a lot of us lefties who are guffawing right now and are happy to see Palin seemingly stumbling drunkenly from occasional interview to occasional interview.” Coates asserts that McCain “[tossed] her to the wolves” and notes that while she surely had some agency in this whole mess, “where I am from the elders protect you, and pull you back when you’ve gone too far, when your head has gotten too big.”

Where I come from, a woman—and especially a woman governor with executive experience—doesn’t have to rely on any elder or any man to protect her and pull her ass out of the fire. She can make a decision all on her own. (Palin was more than happy to tell Charles Gibson that she made her decision to join the McCain ticket without blinking.) I agree with Coates that the McCain camp was craven, sexist, and disrespectful in its choice of Palin, but I don’t agree that the Alaska governor was a passive victim of their Machiavellian plotting. A very successful woman, Palin has the wherewithal to move forward consciously. What she did was move forward thoughtlessly and overconfidently, without considering that her abilities or qualifications would ever be questioned.

Christopher Orr writes sympathetically about the scenario that Palin may have envisioned, in which she tours the country on the wave of adoration that buoyed her out of St. Paul and through a post-convention victory lap. In his mind, she might well have continued to give winning, grinning interviews, charming the pants off regular folks all across the country, if the accursed McCain campaign hadn’t nervously locked her in a no-press-allowed tower. Orr compares Palin to a talented athlete who, as a result of being overcoached, doesn’t soar to new physical heights but instead gets “broken down, [loses] confidence in his game, [becomes] tentative, second guessing himself even to the point of paralysis.”

Surely if Palin’s political muscles were as taut and supple as Orr suspects, the campaign would not have been so quick to put her on a special training regimen.

It was so predictable that we would get to a pity-poor-helpless-Sarah phase. The press was already warming up for it on the day McCain announced her as his running mate, when NBC reporter Andrea Mitchell speculated that McCain’s choice was designed to declaw scrappy Joe Biden, whose aggressive style would come off as bullying next to the sweet hockey mom from Alaska. Now, of course, we know about the hockey moms and the pit bulls; the more-powerful-than-expected Palin juggernaut forestalled the pity/victim/mean-boy/poor-Sarah phase.

So here it is, finally. And as unpleasant as it may be to watch the humiliation of a woman who waltzed into a spotlight too strong to withstand, I flat out refuse to be manipulated into another stage of gendered regress—back to the pre-Pelosi, pre-Hillary days when girls couldn’t stand the heat and so were shooed back to the kitchen.

Sarah Palin is no wilting flower. She is a politician who took the national stage and sneered at the work of community activists. She boldly tries to pass off incuriosity and lassitude as regular-people qualities, thereby doing a disservice to all those Americans who also work two jobs and do not come from families that hand out passports and backpacking trips, yet still manage to pick up a paper and read about their government and seek out experience and knowledge.

When you stage a train wreck of this magnitude—trying to pass one underqualified chick off as another highly qualified chick with the lame hope that no one will notice—well then, I don’t feel bad for you.

When you treat women as your toys, as gullible and insensate pawns in your Big Fat Presidential Bid—or in Palin’s case, in your Big Fat Chance to Be the First Woman Vice President Thanks to All the Cracks Hillary Put in the Ceiling—I don’t feel bad for you.

When you don’t take your own career and reputation seriously enough to pause before striding onto a national stage and lying about your record of opposing a Bridge to Nowhere or using your special-needs child to garner the support of Americans in need of health care reform you don’t support, I don’t feel bad for you.

When you don’t have enough regard for your country or its politics to cram effectively for the test—a test that helps determine whether or not you get to run that country and participate in its politics—I don’t feel bad for you.

When your project is reliant on gaining the support of women whose reproductive rights you would limit, whose access to birth control and sex education you would curtail, whose health care options you would decrease, whose civil liberties you would take away, and whose children and husbands and brothers (and sisters and daughters and friends) you would send to war in Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, Russia, and wherever else you saw fit without actually understanding international relations, I don’t feel bad for you.

I don’t want to be played by the girl-strings anymore. Shaking our heads and wringing our hands in sympathy with Sarah Palin is a disservice to every woman who has ever been unfairly dismissed based on her gender, because this is an utterly fair dismissal, based on an utter lack of ability and readiness. It’s a disservice to minority populations of every stripe whose place in the political spectrum has been unfairly spotlighted as mere tokenism; it is a disservice to women throughout this country who have gone from watching a woman who—love her or hate her—was able to show us what female leadership could look like to squirming in front of their televisions as they watch the woman sent to replace her struggle to string a complete sentence together.

In fact, the only people I feel sorry for are Americans who invested in a hopeful, progressive vision of female leadership, but who are now stuck watching, verbatim, a
Saturday Night Live
skit.

Palin is tough as nails. She will bite the head off a moose and move on. So, no, I don’t feel sorry for her. I feel sorry for women who have to live with what she and her running mate have wrought.

The Un-Hillary: Why Watching Sarah Palin Is Agony for Women

Emily Bazelon

When Harriet Miers blew her murder boards—days spent grilling in preparation for her Senate confirmation hearings—she yanked her own nomination to the Supreme Court. Her “uncertain, underwhelming responses” made her handlers panic, and so Miers and the Bush administration called off the show.

Sarah Palin’s murder boards have taken place in public. We’ve all watched her stumped and stumbling in her interviews with Katie Couric. When asked about the Supreme Court, Palin mentioned
Roe v. Wade
and then couldn’t name another case. This time, she didn’t repeat stock phrases. She just went silent. Kathleen Parker at National Review Online and Fareed Zakaria in
Newsweek
have called for her to follow Miers and pull out. But Palin isn’t expendable—the Republican base that mistrusted Miers loves her. So instead of bowing out, she heads into her debate with Joe Biden with expectations so low either she or her opponent seems bound to trip over them.

For women who are watching this all unfold, this means a lot of analysis, much of it angst-ridden. Conservatives express straightforward disappointment. “I watch her interviews with the held breath of an anxious parent, my finger poised over the mute button in case it gets too painful,” Parker writes glumly. “Unfortunately, it often does. My cringe reflex is exhausted.”

Many more-liberal women, meanwhile, make the point that Palin’s poverty of knowledge is a big reason to doubt John McCain’s judgment, as Ruth Marcus drives home in her column in the
Washington Post
this week. The problem is that Palin is a vice presidential candidate who is not ready to be president, not that she’s a woman who isn’t ready. Given that, let her fail now, before she does real damage in office.

But Palin’s gender is at the center of another set of reactions I’ve been hearing and reading among women who don’t support her ticket, who are filled with ambivalence over how bad she is. Laugh at the Tina Fey parodies that make Palin ridiculous just by quoting her verbatim. And then cry. When Palin tanks, it’s good for the country if you want Obama and Biden to win, but it’s bad for the future of women in national politics. I’m in this boat, too. Should we feel sorry for Sarah Palin? No. But if she fails miserably, we might be excused for feeling a bit sorry for ourselves.

Palin is the most prominent woman on the political stage at the moment. By taking unprepared hesitancy and lack of preparation to a sentence-stopping level, she’s yanking us back to the old assumption that women can’t hack it at these heights. We know that’s not true—we’ve just watched Hillary Clinton power through a campaign with a masterful grasp of policy and detail. Clinton lost in part because she was the girl grind. Complex sentences, the names of Supreme Court cases, and bizarre warnings about foreign heads of state invading our airspace weren’t her problem. The fear now is that Palin is the anti-Hillary and that her lack of competence threatens to undo what the Democratic primary did for women. Palin won’t bust through the ceiling that has Hillary’s 18 million cracks in it. She’ll give men an excuse to replace it with a new one.

Worrying about this can lead you to an odd, even self-contradictory amalgam of anger and pity. Judith Warner embodied this in the
New York Times
when she described watching Palin smile while sitting down with Henry Kissinger and feeling a “wave of self-recognition and sympathy” and an “upsurge of concern and kinship.” In the next breath, in proper feminist fashion, she points out that glamorizing incompetence “means that any woman who exudes competence will necessarily be excluded from the circle of sisterhood.” But then Warner loops back to her opening sympathy and ends by casting Palin’s nomination as not only “an insult to the women (and men) of America” but “an act of cruelty toward her as well.” The suggestion is that John McCain inflicted the cruelty when he picked her.

As Rebecca Traister points out in Salon, there’s an obvious feminist comeback here. Shut down the “Palin pity party,” Traister urges. “Shaking our heads and wringing our hands in sympathy with Sarah Palin is a disservice to every woman who has ever been unfairly dismissed based on her gender, because this is an utterly fair dismissal, based on an utter lack of ability and readiness.” Good point. And an especially pertinent one on the eve of the vice presidential debate. Traister’s argument refutes the McCain campaign’s effort to spin the justified attacks on Palin as sexism. The campaign can’t rightly dismiss Palin’s critics as sexist for jumping on her thin, stock-phrase-laden answers to reasonable questions. It would be sexist—and destructive for the country—to demand less of a vice presidential candidate. But the answer isn’t necessarily to throw the sexism line back in the campaign’s face, as Campbell Brown did on CNN last week. Brown scolded the campaign for treating Palin as if she’s too delicate to handle the press. But where is Palin in this equation? Doesn’t she have to account for the way she’s been shielded from questions that shouldn’t be hard for her to answer?

Traister is right that this is on Palin at least as much as it’s on John McCain. Palin put herself in line for the presidency; she could have turned down the invitation to join the ticket. She gains from this campaign no matter what—before it, she had no national profile, now she has an outsize one, and all the criticism will just make her true fans love her more. (They’re ready to eat Kathleen Parker alive.) She has cannily based her appeal on scorning the media, so it hardly makes sense to feel pity for her when the media scorn
her
, given all the fodder she’s provided.

For all of these reasons, I should take Traister’s advice and stop agonizing. I’m not ambivalent about Palin’s positions on taxes, stem-cell research, or offshore drilling. Why should I be ambivalent about how she performs in the debate? What if Palin does unexpectedly well and gives McCain another boost in the polls? Better she should go down hard for knowing nothing about the Supreme Court than that the court should move ever rightward because the Republicans get to pick the next justices.

And yet. When I watch Palin, I can’t help but cringe along with Parker. Call it women’s solidarity, however misplaced. I keep coming back to this prim phrase: Please, don’t make a spectacle of yourself. String some coherent sentences together. Your efforts to wrap yourself in Hillary’s mantle make no sense in terms of what you’d actually do in office. But if you could pull off just a bit of her debating prowess—just a bit—I’ll step a little lighter when I wake up Friday morning.