Enough With The Mommy Issues Already
No wire hangers!
Obama had it right when he told the press to back off Sarah Palin’s soap opera of a family–but for all the wrong reasons. When you parade your children around as campaign props, not to mention issue press releases about them, you can hardly take offense when the media start discussing them. It’s not because of some misguided sense of chivalry that the mainstream media and the liberal blogosphere should cut it out.
Her personal life should be “out of bounds,” as Obama urged, because every time we take aim at Bristol or analyze Palin’s skills as a mother, the monster that is the Palin Phenomenon grows a little bit stronger. With each jab at her all-too-public home life, Palin gets to cry sexism–sometimes even legitimately, like when we speculate whether she can handle raising five kids and being the VP. Would we ask the same question of a male candidate?
An official notice to those who are freaked out by the thought of a Palin America: stop playing along! When she trots out her youngsters or cites her mom credentials as candidate credentials, don’t take the bait. She has Joe and Jane American on her side when it comes to folksy family anecdotes. Don’t fight her on the issues she’s sure to win–they’re the issues that didn’t matter in the first place.
The ONLY way to beat Palin is to quit letting her (and, by extension, the Republican party) define the debate. Forget the identity politics. Let’s deal with the issue politics, because that’s where she’s far out of the mainstream. The majority of Americans disagree with Palin on a whole slew of subjects, but how will they ever know when all we talk about is her uterus?
