The Skeptical Optimist

I remember how horrified I was personally when the United States re-elected George W Bush after what was in my opinion 4 years of incompetence. In the run up to the election, I thought there was no way this guy who had dodged the draft, lied about weapons of mass destruction, given tax breaks to the very rich (etc) could beat the Vietnam war decorated veteran, intellectually minded and stentorian looking John Kerry… of course I was wrong.

Let me be frank about my liberal bias here: I read the New York Times daily and subscribe to the New Yorker and it doesn’t help that I spent my formative college years in a fairly left leaning campus where Republicans were treated at best as oddities and at worst as crazed pariahs. Till now, every time I meet an out and out Republican who seems like a really nice reasonable person, I can’t help but wonder - how did you elect the guy who with one decision is responsible for so many American military deaths, maimed veterans, billions in US taxpayers money lost to corrupt war contracts and I’m not even going into the biggest tragedy of all: the unthinkable number of Iraqi civilian deaths and the equally unimaginable trauma that this 5 year conflict has brought to the Iraqis. But I digress. I’m sure everyone has their reasons, they’re just not transparent or readily understandable to me.

What I wanted to write about was the new frenzy around the Republican Vice-Presidential nominee Sarah Palin. Apparently, “white women” (talk about the racist undertones here) are rushing in droves to support her, so much so that Barack Obama is down in the national polls.

Let’s look a little closer at her appeal here: she’s got that frontier, never say die mentality of the Alaskan moose hunter, plus she has 5 children, including a Down syndrome baby whose condition she knew of prenatally and a pregnant teenager who at age 17 is going to marry the father of the baby. I can see her appeal to conservatives: her steadfast pro-life stance and her insistence that evolution may not be the right thing to teach little children in schools. I respect opinions of this group of people, in so far that, this is consistent with their world view and they are voting as such, fair enough.

But for the rest of the womenfolk in the US, and let’s face it, McCain did not nominate Sarah Palin for her foreign policy or even national policy experience or for her ability to be a worthy commander-in-chief (being photographed in military uniform with the troops doesn’t count) if he has a bad biopsy. He nominated her to peel of some Hillary Clinton supporters who were on the fence about Barack Obama and to invigorate the Republican conservative base.

So that’s what makes all this talk about feminist power and identity politics stink. So ok, she’s a working mother - but as one astute American mother pointed out : there are quite a few jobs where you can successful “juggle a blackberry and a breast-pump” (and I would add a pregnant teenager and 3 other kids) but Vice-President is not one of them. I don’t care what sexist labels you throw on me, they don’t work. I am the working mother of 2 young babies and let me tell you, I’m not vice-president and it is not at all easy. Multiply the responsibilities and consequence of my work a thousandfold and you get Sarah Palin and it’s looking pretty scary. This is a woman who preaches abstinence, but not quite successfully to her daughter, and someone who took a plane trip to give a speech in spite of the fact that her amniotic fluid was leaking. She also knew that her teenage daughter was knocked up and decided to accept the presidential nomination in spite of the fact that Bristol would be exposed to relentless critique from the media. What kind of mother does that?

These are not sexist comments at all. While McCain campers might cry: you wouldn’t ask this of a man! Let’s see- how many men running for national office have more than 2 kids, any under 1 year and can even get pregnant while on the job? This is not about gender at all, this is about who is the more competent for the job and who is able to focus completely on the task at hand.

I find it frightening that some Americans want “an average, normal working mother/family” to be one step away from the White House. We want our leaders to be the best of us, not the mediocre. We want them to have gone to the best universities or have a long experience in national and foreign policy. Just because a politician can relate and empathise with the ordinary man, doesn’t mean that his political leadership will be the best for the middle class or the blue collar worker: just look at those segments under the Bush administration.

So it’s disingenuous when Palin talks about 18 million cracks in the glass ceiling and and insult to Hillary. If Palin shows up her inexperience, her potentially dishonest portrayal of her time as Alaskan governor and generally dumbs down the debate on foreign and national policy by launching meaningless attacks on her opponents, then I would argue that glass ceiling is going to be much thicker than it was when we started in this American election season. And in the end, this ceiling is just in our minds, we should be electing people based on ability, vision and honesty not race, gender and political affiliation.

Tags: palin, politics, republicans, working mothers