“Oh, Please!” On Palin
September 10th, 2008 . by economistmomOK, enough of this “lipstick on a pig” (non) issue… I’ve just got to say “oh, please!” (or maybe “oh puh-leeeeez”)… How darn right ridiculous that this is being debated on the news this morning. I was happy to see Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus speak on this silly issue on MSNBC this morning. I had just read Ruth’s column in this morning’s Post, and said to myself (as another working mom with a similar perspective on this whole Palin craze): “right on, Ruth –I’m with you.” Ruth’s lead off is so dead on (my emphasis added):
I was driving to school to pick up the kids, listening to conservative talk radio. The subject was, of course, Sarah Palin, and the villains were, of course, liberals. Not just any liberals, but feminist journalist turncoats who preach gender equality until Republicans practice it.
I was, it turns out, among them.
I’m not telling this story to brag of my notoriety — I was far down the list — or to boast about being the Good Mommy. As my kids would be delighted to tell you, I’ve been anything but recently, as the national conventions collided with the start of school.
But the moment captured the topsy-turvy nature of the Palin debate: The loudest voices in the usual stay-at-home chorus cheer Palin’s careerism, while many working moms wince at the thought of a vice presidential mother of five.
Then Ruth goes on to explain the tradeoffs most working moms go through–which I think explains why we may “wince” at Sarah Palin’s choices–or at least why we might have more trouble relating to Palin’s choices than either stay-at-home moms or working dads:
I don’t question whether Palin can pull off the most impressive juggling act in the history of working moms, balancing, as she told People magazine, BlackBerry and breast pump. But I do wonder — somewhat to my astonishment — why she’d choose to, and I suspect many mothers feel the same.
Looking over my female friends — educated and accomplished — it is hard to think of one who has not trimmed her career sails to accommodate family life. Amazingly, I know more women who have opted out than who work full-steam ahead.
This is not what I expected. Fourteen years ago, pregnant with my first child, I listened to two female friends, then high-powered Capitol Hill lawyers, discuss their dream part-time schedules.
“Not me, ladies,” I thought, smugly certain. Eight months later, maternity leave up, I was in my editor’s office, announcing that I wanted to scale back to four days a week. In a few years, I was down to three — and my friends had left their Hill jobs. Now I work full time, but not without ample agonizing and only because of a flexible boss.
It so happens that just yesterday I turned down an opportunity to be interviewed by CNN (TV), on the subject of the new budget projections, because my son had his first fall-league baseball game of the season, and this was his first season in “the Majors” of Little League (he’s a Cub). That was somewhat agonizing for me, as I’ve never been on CNN and think of it as a pretty plum gig. I did internally debate it for awhile, and I must admit, was probably hoping for a rain-out. But the game was not cancelled, and I was on snack duty, and it was my son’s major league debut–so I had to say “no” to CNN… (And I don’t regret the decision, even though the Cubs lost.)
So I think Ruth hits it right on the head when she points out that it’s working moms like us who seem to have more discomfort about Palin and her choices than others do. And yes, it’s different for working moms than for working dads–call me sexist–because only moms can have maternal instinct (and maternal instinct is different from paternal instinct). It’s a discomfort in seeing Palin choose to swing the tradeoff so far toward the career side where most of us never go–whether that discomfort is out of a wee bit of jealousy (yes, just maybe), or from our doubts (from first-hand experience) about whether that choice makes sense for any working mom, even for Palin herself.
“Lipstick on a pig” is of course an age old political saying that normally would be deemed entirely impersonal.
But context matters. The news reports of the speech I’ve seen say that Obama’s audience took it as a reference to Palin and cheered it as such. If that’s true, one can’t have it both ways. The best Obama can say then is, I didn’t mean it the way my audience of supporters took it. Which would be evidence of … inexperience. National politicians are supposed to be the experts at knowing what they can say to whom and when.
“Voodoo economics” is another generation-old saying. But if McCain or one of his top people charged that Obama’s economic plan was “Voodoo economics”, I’m pretty darn sure there’d quickly be cries from the left about how that was “racial code”.
It’s not like Obama’s people don’t play this game full force. It wasn’t long ago that Hillary was explaining why she hadn’t dropped out of the race yet saying, “We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California.” Poor wording, but entirely innocent and obvious intended meaning. Remember all that came hurling at her from Obama’s side for that?
Yes, it’s all ridiculous from an “above it” point of view — but that’s politics, part of the essence of the game, and always has been, everywhere. Manipulating public opinion using everything at hand. Complaining about it is like being a football fan and complaining “hey, the other team is hitting my players!” Your team’s job is to do it more effectively than the other team.
As for “wincing” that Palin wants to balance VP job, kids, blackberry and breast pump, as a personal opinion that may be entirely correct and reasonable.
But as a political observation, if such had ever come about a Democratic female candidate from right-side commentators (like on Fox instead of MSNBC) we all know NOW would be apoplectic, Gloria Steinem would be back writing op-eds in the NY Times, (“when did they ever wince at a man with children running for office? sexist! sexist! sexist!”), and Dems generally would be indignant to livid.
Even though you’d still be just as right. Because that’s how the game is played.
This faux outrage by the McCain campaign and its supporters over the obviously innocent “lipstick” remark is just the latest incident in what I call the “Jerry Springerization” of politics. A campaign and the eager media tell us to forget issues, positions, vision, qualifications, and just focus on some trivial or even completely innocent matter and get all worked up in some “Oh no he di’ ent!” kind of way. The media’s role in stoking this garbage reminds me of what Bugs Bunny does in a scene I remember from my youth — see the scene starting at 2:23 of the video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAhh-SBHFE0
The point is not about sexism, it is about whether Sarah Palin may be taking on far too much for anyone to take on reasonably, let alone someone who is in such a sensitive and important position. She has five kids. At least two of them, Bristol and Trig, have great needs at the moment, probably for some time. Bristol, as a teenage parent, will probably need a fair bit of help from her mother. She has no foreign affairs experience, limited managerial experience (please read Anne Kilkenny’s email for information about how Wasilla hired a town administrator during her mayoral term because she was so unprepared to do it.) Her politics appall me, but frankly I am more concerned about whether she will even have the ability to focus properly on learning about the important issues with all of these family demands. I write this as a mother and practicing lawyer who has had plenty of family issues in the last 5 years. At some point you have to say “enough”. I would not want someone in her situation as VP.
Right call, but it was only cable.
But seriously, you and Ruth assume that all moms face the same trade-offs and struggles that you do, but I don’t know why we should assume that about a would-be veep, or even an Alaska governor. To get to that level of politics, you have to be a total egotist. Kids are nothing but props–like everything else, subsumed to blind ambition. It doesn’t speak well to Pallin’s character, but if selfishness were disqualification for high office, we’d have a completely different slate of candidates (and all people you’ve never heard of).
Of course Mom and Anne, I’m sure you were equally appalled when Hillary Clinton with HER school age daughter tried to remodel 14% of the US economy. Maybe the burden of being a working mother explains why she made such a bad impression on Brad DeLong.
However, if you’re really so worried about Sarah, shouldn’t you be calling for her to resign from her current high level executive job?
Then again, as Camille Paglia says, maybe it’s a frontierswoman thing you wouldn’t understand:
http://www.salon.com/opinion/paglia/2008/09/10/palin/index2.html
———–quote———
Perhaps Palin seemed perfectly normal to me because she resembles so many women I grew up around in the snow belt of upstate New York. For example, there were the robust and hearty farm women of Oxford, a charming village where my father taught high school when I was a child. We first lived in an apartment on the top floor of a farmhouse on a working dairy farm. Our landlady, who was as physically imposing as her husband, was an all-American version of the Italian immigrant women of my grandmother’s generation — agrarian powerhouses who could do anything and whose trumpetlike voices could pierce stone walls.
Here’s one episode. My father and his visiting brother, a dapper barber by trade, were standing outside having a smoke when a great noise came from the nearby barn. A calf had escaped. Our landlady yelled, “Stop her!” as the calf came careening at full speed toward my father and uncle, who both instinctively stepped back as the calf galloped through the mud between them. Irate, our landlady trudged past them to the upper pasture, cornered the calf, and carried that massive animal back to the barn in her arms. As she walked by my father and uncle, she exclaimed in amused disgust, “Men!”
Now that’s the Sarah Palin brand of can-do, no-excuses, moose-hunting feminism — a world away from the whining, sniping, wearily ironic mode of the establishment feminism represented by Gloria Steinem, a Hillary Clinton supporter whose shameless Democratic partisanship over the past four decades has severely limited American feminism and not allowed it to become the big tent it can and should be. Sarah Palin, if her reputation survives the punishing next two months, may be breaking down those barriers. Feminism, which should be about equal rights and equal opportunity, should not be a closed club requiring an ideological litmus test for membership.
….Frontier women were far bolder and hardier than today’s pampered, petulant bourgeois feminists, always looking to blame their complaints about life on someone else.
————–endquote———-
This faux outrage by the McCain campaign and its supporters over the obviously innocent “lipstick” remark is just the latest incident in what I call the “Jerry Springerization” of politics … garbage…
Except “-ization” implies a recent development, when it is an essential part of democratic politics all that way back to Athens. Pursued by all. The Founding Fathers did it with a vengeance against each other. For instance, this is not a YouTube parody…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5z1XhqsKpUE
… it is the actual text of some of what Adams’ people published against Jefferson in 1800, put to video as Adams’ people would have if they could have. Or read some of the, uh, stuff Jefferson paid the press (using US government money) to write against Hamilton when they were sitting in adjoining offices in Washington’s cabinet.
It’s easy to explain why this is universal behavior through the history of democracies. Consider the pattern of voting. Strangely, it may seem at first, the more weight an individual’s vote actually has in an election, and the more the individual knows about the issues facing the candidates, the less likely that person is to actually vote in the contest.
E.g., the 2000 turnout in NYS, which I checked at the time, was on the order to 50%, 40%, 30%, 15%, 10%, 2%(!), in the voting for president, senate, congress, state legislature, NYC city council, and NYC local school boards — exactly reverse of the weight each vote had for that office, and of the personal “closeness” of the voter to issues at that level. A few people voting together could actually turn a school board election. (And did — Bloomberg then disbanded the school boards because most of the 2% who voted worked in the schools and had captured the boards.)
It seems paradoxical, but there’s an easy two-step explanation for the pattern.
1) The long-term puzzle in political economics, why do people vote at all? Much less spend any valuable effort in researching electoral opinions? After all, even in a closely contested local election, one’s vote is only one of thousands and very unlikely to turn anything. And in the great majority of elections there is no contest at all (90 % reelection rate, gerrymandering) and one’s vote may be only one of millions. In economic terms the payoff to the effort of investing in voting is 0. Why do people bother?
2) In response to #1 — and the empirical observation, as from the numbers above, that left alone most people won’t vote — the political parties spend hundreds of millions of dollars of marketing and advertising to whip up interest in partisan voting
Remember how profoundly ignorant all voters are — 100% of voters (including we smarties here) are seriously-to-totally ignorant of the great majority of issues politicians handle. And the great majority of voters are totally ignorant of near everything outside their personal experience. If you doubt it, read some surveys (I can’t post multiple links here). The results are head-banging appalling, it can make one wonder how we survive at all.
So how to market to ignorant people like us? With emotional messages, mostly simply conveyed. “Jefferson will bring rape and murder!… immigrants are stealing jobs! … appeaser! … war monger! … liar! … liar!”. And that was just the 1800 election.
David Friedman has compared this explicitly to marketing for pro sports teams, which leads to otherwise normal people as partisan fans sitting bare-chested in below-freezing weather screaming obscenities while wearing cheese heads. Women! (Not kidding — consider the direct importance of the Roman chariot racing teams to Rome’s politics.) It works!
But the further below the level of heavily invested-in national “brand name” politicians and issues one goes, the less well it works. That’s why the lower-level the election, the lower the turnout.
Right now here in
Moscow on the HudsonManhattan I know plenty of people who are rabidly anti-Bush, and as a result fairly pro-Obama — but not one in five of them can name their City Council member. Which makes no sense at all from a traditional “representative politics” point of view — but makes plenty of sense from a political marketing point of view, considering the importance of New York campaign contributions, and media and popular support to the national party.And if all this isn’t bad enough, “Springerized” politics is genetic in us, so we have dang little hope of improving. Studies show that political partisans not only really do not recognize the deceits and deceptions of their own side, but actually get an endorphin high from denying them! Maybe that gives some idea where wars come from — real and political.
So if you are one of the many who think the other party lies and deceives, but yours doesn’t, well … you might be an addict. Literally.
This is not to say there are no differences between candidates and parties worth noting on election day.
But it is to say this is how democracy works, always has from the days of Athens on, and always will until technology gives all voters full knowledge of everything, and our genetic code mutates for the better to boot.
Progress will come from being realistic about it, and working from there. Denying it will make partisanship and the problems of the system even worse. And like Churchill said, it’s already the worst of systems, except for what else has been tried.
Here’s the [Source] the filter wouldn’t accept in my prior comment.
As an aside on another way progress really is making things worse … when my first kid was born one of the joys of it was getting as an adult to watch hours of Bugs Bunny cartoons at all hours on Cartoon Network, after Ted Turner bought that library. That got me to go out and buy the VHS tapes of “uncensored” Bugs Bunny & Co, with directors’ commentaries and all. Wonderful stuff. Kids — like I was when I saw them on Satruday morning shows — could never fully appreciate them.
But now, for my last-in-life kid, they’re all gone off CN for new private-label drek and semi-drek.
The world continues to deteriorate.
Jim G,
First, I’m in Manhattan, too, so drop me an email (BrooksBud@AOL) and let’s grab pizza and beers, tell bad jokes, and craft solutions to all the world’s problems.
Yes, I’m aware of the nastiness of campaign rhetoric of our nation’s early days, but that does not mean that we are not seeing a “Springerization” trend in campaigns and campaign coverage by the media in the last couple of decades vs. prior decades. I think the 24-hour news networks, the increased popularity of partisan talk radio and ideologically uniform talk radio station formats, as well as the partisan websites, partisan blogs and email (with the capability to rapidly and broadly spread attacks on candidates, substantiated or not) are both a cause and effect of this trend (both the “Springerized” tone and the hyperpartisanship), both driving the demand for it and responding to demand for it, in a vicious circle.
As a note, re:
if you are one of the many who think the other party lies and deceives, but yours doesn’t
I assume you were using the general “you”, but just in case and for the record, I’m not a partisan of either party nor do I even consider myself committed to or strongly gravitating toward either (or any) party, and I also think both parties are guilty of gross deception on a regular basis.
As for your question of why people vote, I think many people do it for the reason I do it: primarily out of a sense of civic duty, and secondarily for the emotional benefit of self-expression and pride in our nation (for the opportunity to vote).
Interesting coincidence; Jim’s point is nicely dramatized in the 1962 movie ‘Advise and Consent’ which I’m watching on Turner Classic Movies as I type this:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0055728/
Henry Fonda, Charles Laughton, Walter Pidgeon, Gene Tierney, Franchot Tone…and the man who took Ronald Reagan’s first wife away from him. Quite a powerhouse cast.
Anyway, the game is afoot and the Republicans have Big Mo on their side:
http://pal2pal.com/BLOGEE/index.php?/site/mccain_palin_button/
The “nasty campaign rhetoric” takes voters away from the issues. Palin opposes stem cell research, state health benefits for same sex partners, believes the Iraz War is a “task from God” is pro-life, thinks creationism should be taught in public schools, disbelieves global warming, supports drilling in the Arctic Natl Wildlife reserve. I hope voters decide based on issues, not lipstick on pigs.