The Snarky Liberal

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?

Sarah Palin, Noted Fauxminist

There’s a whole lot of whatnot and hullabaloo flying around about Sarah Palin. She’s a supermom. She managed a meteoric rise to power while raising five kids, snowmobiling the tundra and terrorizing the local moose population. She went back to work three days after giving birth. She’s got awesome optical accessories.

In the rush to enumerate her accomplishments, women are losing sight of the fact that Sarah Palin is not a feminist. She is a token woman, a ploy to simultaneously appease disgruntled Hillary supporters and the reluctant religious right. John McCain needed some feminist street cred; Sarah Palin was the solution.

Women, especially liberal women, who support Palin solely on the basis of shared genitalia are undermining feminist causes and playing right into McCain’s hands. I’m talking to you, PUMAs.

Feminists believe in equal pay for equal work. Feminists believe in a woman’s right to control her own body and make her own reproductive choices (Feminists for Life is a contradiction in terms). In a Palin America, a woman who is raped and impregnated would be forced to carry that rapist’s fetus to term. In a Palin America, teenage girls (and boys) remain blissfully ignorant when it comes to contraception.

Not to mention, liberal ladies, that Palin’s platform of issues is textbook scary conservative. Pro gun. Pro death penalty. Pro creationism in schools. Anti gay marriage. Anti environment. (Seriously, who still believes global warming isn’t our species’ fault?) Pro oil drilling. Pro gunning down wolves with helicopters. She attends a pentecostal church (although she now conveniently labels herself as “non-denominational”). She supported the bridge to nowhere back when it was politically convenient. Oh, and she doesn’t concern herself with things like the war in Iraq–not with so many square miles of tundra to govern.

Sarah Palin’s candidacy is a false milestone. It undermines the feminist movement to support a candidate who touts feminism while advocating the rollback of much of what the movement has achieved in the last 50 years. It’s a shame that her personal life is making news, because it distracts from what we should be talking about: Palin’s faux feminist beliefs and sheer inadequacy for the job.

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