Monday, September 1, 2008

The Reaction to Palin


"People's families are off limits, and people's children are especially off limits."

Barack Obama


There is breaking news today from Republican presumptive vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin about medical rumors.

At this point, I doubt the rumors ever really threatened her nomination, the way medical rumors ultimately sandbagged Tom Eagleton's nomination in 1972. But it is raising questions about how thoroughly Palin was vetted.

Reuters is reporting that Palin's unmarried 17-year-old daughter is pregnant. Palin has confirmed that information, apparently in an attempt to squelch rumors of her alleged role in trying to cover up the pregnancy.

 ST. PAUL (Reuters) — The 17-year-old daughter of Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin is pregnant, Palin said on Monday in an announcement intended to knock down rumors by liberal bloggers that Palin faked her own pregnancy to cover up for her child.
   Bristol Palin, one of Alaska Gov. Palin's five children with her husband, Todd, is about five months pregnant and is going to keep the child and marry the father, the Palins said in a statement released by the campaign of Republican presidential candidate John McCain.
   Bristol Palin made the decision on her own to keep the baby, McCain aides said.
   "We have been blessed with five wonderful children who we love with all our heart and mean everything to us," the Palins' statement said.
   "Our beautiful daughter Bristol came to us with news that as parents we knew would make her grow up faster than we had ever planned. As Bristol faces the responsibilities of adulthood, she knows she has our unconditional love and support," the Palins said.
   The Palins asked the news media to respect the young couple's privacy.


To his credit, Barack Obama insisted that Bristol Palin's personal life has no relevance when Americans are evaluating whether her mother has been a good governor or whether she would make a good vice president.

(I'm glad Obama said that, but I wonder how many in the mainstream media will say anything about Obama's remark last spring that he didn't want either of his daughters to be "punished with a baby" if they made a mistake.)

  • Sally Quinn wonders, in the Washington Post, why McCain was not concerned about the impact of Bristol Palin's pregnancy on her mother's ability to function as vice president if, indeed, he knew about it before making his selection.

    "Not only do we have a woman with five children, including an infant with special needs, but a woman whose 17-year-old child will need her even more in the coming months," Quinn writes. "Not to mention the grandchild. This would inevitably be an enormous distraction for a new vice president (or president) in a time of global turmoil. Not only in terms of her job, but from a media standpoint as well."

  • Nancy Pfotenhauer, a senior policy adviser and national spokesperson for the McCain campaign who also, apparently, contributes to the Wall Street Journal, told CNN the media's treatment of Palin in this matter reflects a "double standard," observing that no one has asked Obama if he could be a father to his two young daughters and still be president.

    The answer to that, however, lies in the parental roles that society has always expected of the genders. The male parent is the one who is expected to go outside the home and earn a living. The female parent may also earn a living outside the home, but she is the parent who, typically, is expected to be on the front lines for family issues. It is the mother who provides most of the nurturing in a family — even if the father is a loving and devoted parent who is both physically and emotionally available to his children.

    The parental roles are reversed in some households, but most families are structured by the traditional gender assignments.

    Unless those societal expectations change radically, the first female vice president will have to find a way to satisfactorily balance her occupational responsibilities and her familial ones.

    Or else the president (or presidential nominee) who chooses her will need to pick a woman who is past the point in her life when her children are still under her roof.
Beyond the unexpected news from Palin's daughter, I don't think anyone needed to have a psychic episode to anticipate a variety of reactions to John McCain's decision to ask a woman to be his vice presidential running mate.

On a personal level, as a voter and an American citizen, I haven't decided how I will vote in November. I am leaning in a particular direction, but I am open to all points of view and I may well choose a different candidate when I cast my vote.

When Palin was introduced as McCain's running mate on Friday, I wanted to learn more and I expected to learn more at this week's Republican convention.

At this point, it's hard to say how much of the convention will proceed as usual, so the initial outlet for learning about a running mate may not be available this year.

Of course, Palin is still scheduled to debate Joe Biden on Oct. 2, and the nation will get to watch her campaign for the next two months so we should have a good idea what she's all about by the time the voters go to the polls.

That hasn't prevented the media from rushing to judgment:
  • E.J. Dionne writes, in the Washington Post, that there should be a revolt in progress at the convention — "for the same reasons so many Republicans opposed President Bush's selection of Harriet Miers for the Supreme Court."

    Dionne elaborates, "Palin is, if anything, less qualified for the vice presidency (and the presidency) than Miers was for the court. But there is one big difference: Palin passes all the right-wing litmus tests, which means she is unlikely to suffer Miers' fate."

    Therefore, Palin gets a pass.

    The argument, as far as Dionne is concerned, comes down to ideological acceptability for Republicans. But, for him, it also seems to be a matter of experience.

    Now, whether one agrees with a vice presidential candidate on some or all of the issues should be important to every voter.

    But — for Dionne, at least — the question of experience seems to be about having the right kind of experience.

    "Miers, at least, had been a lawyer for 35 years, the head of the state bar in Texas and White House counsel," Dionne writes. That's true.

    "Palin's experience comes down to a couple of years as governor and six years as mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, a town with fewer than 10,000 residents." That's also true.

    And it leads me to a couple of points:

    1. Dionne refers to the population of Palin's hometown. Are we giving more value to large states and large cities than to small states and small towns?

      Yes, Palin is governor of a small state. But Joe Biden, while a member of the U.S. Senate, represents a small state. The difference in population between Alaska and Delaware is less than 200,000.

      Is the experience of representing Delaware in Congress more valuable than the experience of governing Alaska because Delaware's population is larger by roughly the number of people living in Salt Lake City?

    2. Is longevity or continuity of service more valuable than the kind of service on a résumé?

      Yes, Biden has been in the Senate for nearly 36 years. But how much experience does he have in an executive capacity? None. Palin has been governor "a couple of years" and she spent "six years as mayor of Wasilla."

      Palin's experience may be on a "small" scale, but she's had experience working with budgets and legislative bodies. It may not be ideal preparation for the presidency, but it's closer in nearly every respect than the work Biden has been doing.

      The one area in which Biden would have the advantage would be his experience in foreign affairs.

      And that's a pretty important area these days. In fact, as Dionne's colleague, David Broder, writes in the Washington Post, Biden possesses "a base of knowledge Palin cannot hope to match no matter how hard she crams for their Oct. 2 debate."

  • Broder has more to say about the upcoming Biden-Palin debate.

    "Her credibility will be on the line that night in St. Louis," he writes, "as will Biden's self-discipline. He cannot afford to condescend. She will have to know her facts.

    "But long before that, Palin will have to go out campaigning on her own and face media interviews — all the tests that make former McCain campaign consultant Mike Murphy describe her candidacy as 'fragile.'"


    As any candidate in a national campaign discovers, a casual word selection can come back to haunt you. Especially if the words weren't yours originally.

    • McCain has run into problems with the media because he wasn't sure how many homes he owns — even though some of the real estate holdings belong not to him but to his wife.

    • Obama has run into problems for a number of statements — including his casual remark about the United States having 58 states. (That would be an understandable slip, coming from someone of my parents' generation, who grew up with 48 states and then saw the number expand as a young adult — but the number of states has never changed in Obama's lifetime.)

    • I don't know how casually the decision was made — or if it was made casually at all — but Biden had to abandon his first campaign for the presidency because of allegations that he plagiarized the words of a British politician.

      I studied journalism in school and I worked as a writer and editor in the field, and plagiarism was always a huge no-no. If the decision to plagiarize someone else's words was, indeed, made in an almost careless way, that seems to make it worse.

  • Nothing that I've heard from any of the candidates rises to the level of Gerald Ford's premature liberation of eastern Europe from Soviet domination during the 1976 debates with Jimmy Carter.

    Well, not yet, anyway.

  • In the New York Times, Maureen Dowd dismisses Palin as a vice president "in go-go boots."

    "Palinistas, as they are called, love Sarah’s spunky, relentlessly quirky 'Northern Exposure' story," Dowd writes, "from being a Miss Alaska runner-up, and winning Miss Congeniality, to being mayor and hockey mom in Wasilla, a rural Alaskan town of 6,715, to being governor for two years to being the first woman ever to run on a national Republican ticket."

  • Nolan Finley writes, in the Detroit News, that neither of the "rookies" (Obama and Palin) is ready for prime time.

    "[I]s Sarah Palin ready for the Oval Office?" he asks. "She's been governor for just two years, and before that was the mayor of a small town. Had she finished this term and another, and sustained her early success, she would have earned a look for the ticket.

    "She's certainly one of the GOP's top young prospects, but she's being called up to the big leagues too soon."


    Finley is critical of Obama's experience as well.

    "[I]t is embarrassing," he writes, "to hear Obama, 47, explain how his work on the streets of Chicago fully prepared him to be leader of the free world because he met a lot of people down on their luck. He's been in the Senate just four years and has spent half of that time running for president.

    "And yet, last week in Denver, the elder statesmen of the Democratic Party walked one by one to the podium to extol the leadership skills of Obama. They had to be choking on their words. Obama doesn't chair a Senate committee, hasn't been one of its most influential voices, has never really led anything."


    Ultimately, Finley says, "This election will indeed prove the adage that anyone can grow up to be president. Only now you don't have to bother with the growing up part."

  • Foreign newspapers are keeping an eye on what's happening in the American election — as they have been all along — and international response to the Palin selection is coming in.

    Jon Swaine reports, in the London Telegraph, that "[t]he political career and family life of Sarah Palin ... has become the subject of investigations and intense internet rumours, raising fears among Republicans that she was not adequately vetted by John McCain."

    Today's confirmation of Bristol Palin's pregnancy may be all — or only the first — of the "rumours" about Palin's family life to which Swaine refers.

    But there may be another problem lurking out there, Swaine writes, and that's the so-called "troopergate" story, in which Palin has been accused of using her influence as governor to punish her former brother-in-law for divorcing her sister.

    That one could have an ongoing role in the campaign.

  • Edward Luce writes, in the Financial Times, that McCain "has thrown the proverbial cat among the pigeons" by choosing Palin.

    He suggests the selection has created divisions in the Republican Party. That's something of which we may see more evidence — if the convention is allowed to proceed on schedule later this week.

    However, Luce acknowledges that "[m]ost Republicans ... are professing delight. They point to Ms. Palin’s reformist credentials and that she is popular among Alaskans for taking on what she described last week as the 'good ol’ boy' network of the state’s notorious Republican establishment."

    Luce strongly implies, though, that there might be some problems stemming from Palin's religious views. Her anti-abortion beliefs, as demonstrated in carrying to term a baby who was known to have Down syndrome, are well known. To this point, however, I haven't heard as much on her support for the theory of "intelligent design" — which is, as Luce says, a "diluted version of creationism, which rejects Darwinian accounts of evolution."

    That may yet be a plus, though, as Luce is quick to point out. Evangelical Christians tend to support the theory of intelligent design. And "[a] high evangelical turnout can often tip the balance in swing states such as Ohio."

  • Al Jazeera, the Arab news outlet, says the choice "reveals a poor sense of astuteness and serves to underline [McCain's] desperate political expediency."

    And political analyst Marwan Bishara also is critical of Palin's experience — especially her experience in foreign matters.

    "Palin is an inexperienced politician who for most of her career and until merely 20 months ago, was on the council of a small town of 7,300 residents," Bishara writes. "It is not clear how many states on the mainland Palin visited as an adult, but she has never been outside North America except to an American military base in Kuwait."

    (Actually, unless I'm mistaken, Palin paid a visit to a military base in Germany on the same excursion — although it's true that she had to apply for and receive her first-ever passport to make the trip.)

    "She lacks any foreign policy experience or knowledge. Judging from her interests and record, I doubt she can find a number of countries on the map."

    All that may be true, although I would venture to suggest that, even with an austere résumé, Palin has more experience than just about any female in any Middle Eastern country (with the exception of Israel).

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