Carte blanche: Sexist Sarah

Question: Do you think asking about Sarah Palin's roles as a mother and a VP candidate is sexist?

Do you think Alaska has prepared her to potentially be president of the United States?

Do you think her perpetual up do is comprised of her real hair or does she use Jessica Simpson brand extensions?

The people must know.

Well, know this, people: Yes, I think asking about her roles as a mother and VP candidate is sexist.

But it's only sexist because no one's asked about Obama's role as a father and presidential candidate, or Bill Clinton's or George H.W. Bush's -- and there's ample evidence that we should have been asking about Bush, Sr.'s parenting skills long, long ago -- not because it's not an important point.

I think it is, in fact, important to ask how Sarah Palin would view her roles in terms of each other, were she to become vice president. It's one thing to have a TV character "make time for the family" amid national crises -- "because that's the most important thing of all" -- but that's Disney-channel stuff for a reason. Even vice presidents, the also-rans of the executive branch (but stars of the Senate, let me point out), need to be able to focus on the national stage if the #$&% starts heading toward the fan (or if Pakistan starts heading toward India, or Israel toward Palestine, or Russia toward Georgia, etc.).

We don't necessarily need to know what's going on backstage, but we do need to know that the people representing us to the world, who are supposed to have the national best interest in the front of their minds, aren't being preoccupied by arguments over who got to sit with Mom in Air Force Two (or whatever the VP plane is called) last time.

To make this less sexist, we could begin asking how the men on these tickets are dealing with being fathers and presidential/vice-presidential candidates at the same time.

But here's another tack to take: We could ask ourselves why we view Sarah Palin in particular as a possible liability when it comes to choosing between her role as a mother and her role as a VP contender.

We didn't ask what Hillary Rodham Clinton would have done with her roles.

I use HRC's full name here on purpose, because it's hyphenated (in spirit) -- marking her as a feminist. Her record during her husband's administration also speaks to her status as an independent and powerful woman. And despite widespread and somewhat irrational hatred of HRC, she's run for and been elected to the Senate. She's comported herself admirably there, doing what freshman senators need to do to gain respect. While she may have ridden Bill's coattails a bit to get where she is -- and while I think there's a lot to be said for his affairs garnering sympathy for her, which is sexist to-the-max -- she did marry him on purpose, knowing what kind of ambition she had, and he had, and she took charge of as much of her life as it would be humanly possible for any of us to do.

Mad props to HRC, in other words, for defying difficult-to-parse and impossible-to-escape sex-based stereotypes.

My grandma expressed it this way, when HRC had merely intimated she might run: "I would vote for a woman, but Hillary doesn't have any of the positive qualities of women."

My aunt, (even) less enlightened, said "I would never vote for a woman for president, and honestly, you know why? PMS."

I don't know what my aunt's premenstrual experience is like, and I didn't ask, but this is the kind of attitude that seems to lurk behind many questions of whether a woman can or should be president.

Interestingly, my grandma votes Democrat, and my aunt votes Republican; I think this shows through in their statements.

I don't think HRC could really be a Republican -- specifically, I don't think that her brand of feminist empowerment would go over well with the party. They like her economic policies in general, they like her support of the war, but this is also a family party, and her apparent coldness turns them off. (She's also pro-choice, which is a deal-breaker for many Republicans.)

Sarah Palin is a much different proposition. She's neither the withery waif-like wife who waits at home for her husband to bring home the bacon, nor the abortionist, coldhearted feminist that HRC appears to be.

Instead, she's a capable girl-next-door -- from Alaska.

The pictures of Sarah Palin gutting a moose, followed immediately by the picture of her with her husband and five kids, have got to be attractive to the southern-western Republican crowd. Here is a wife of noble character, they're thinking. The fact that her oldest son is in the service gives her the sheen of conferred heroism -- the type of heroism women are supposed to evince, that is, the waiting-it-out sort of Rosie the Riveter -- and her reformationist reputation goes along well with the sense that she could be the tough-minded, fight-your-own-battles, home-cooking mother we've all been waiting for.

She fits so well into the mold of strong domestic, that is, that we can't help but ask ourselves how that domesticity will work itself out when the country's on the line.

That isn't to say she's done it to herself -- that would be horribly sexist -- but that the machine that created her is creating a specific brand of woman-in-power, one that makes sense to the RNC. And that vision appears to be a sexist one.

I have two concerns, other than the obvious ones (I'm an Obama supporter; Palin has no experience; she wants to drill in ANWR; etc.), with putting Sarah Palin "a heartbeat away [groan] from the presidency."

First, she recently had a special-needs child. I don't necessarily believe that women should stay home and raise their kids, but working in the human services industry, I see the effect having a special-needs individual in a family can have -- it can be great, or it can be terrible. The more time she spends disconnected from her family and youngest son, the more likely it will head toward terrible.

Second, I don't think Sarah Palin will do anything to en-fly the ointment of the RNC propaganda machine. Whereas within the rhetoric of empowered-feminist-of-the-70s, HRC has managed to do things differently enough to earn her own identity, Palin has catered to the "hockey mom" ID carved out for her by the good ol' boys of her party.

It's possible she'll -- ahem -- grow a pair, but it's also possible that her willingness to go along with the propaganda will undercut her proposed identity as a reformer.

It's also possible that there is no propaganda. She may actually be exactly what we see.

Which brings us back to the original questions of whether she's really qualified to run the country, and what her stance would be if asked to choose between her kids and her country.

Except insofar as Alaska, and its part in her "hockey-mom"-ness, has helped to create her perceived identity, I don't think it's given her enough experience to govern on a national level.

Consider that she's never been in a legislature -- and would now become Senate tie-breaker vote. Consider the methods used in a town of under 7,000 (at the time -- it's now approaching 10,000) for garnering support for her candidacy and subsequent plans and policies -- and how those methods would almost certainly fail if applied on a national level.

How have the reforms that she's enacted in her home state prepared her for reform of our federal government? (I hate to bring it up, but Alaska's only been a state for about fifty years; the sock hop is older. Could this frontier state possibly have built up the kind of bureaucratic red tape our federal government is famous for in that time?)

My fear is that, like our current president, Sarah Palin would "reform now, ask question later -- or never" and end up botching things like education (No Child Left Behind is a stupid and terrible set of laws) or civil rights (butterfly ballots not counted in high-minority areas of Florida; imprisonment of suspected terrorists goes on without trial; the Patriot Act allows our library book records to be confiscated by the government) thanks to ignorance.

If she stops to figure out the system, she won't have time, even in four to sixteen years, to reform anything. If she doesn't stop to figure it out, she'll reform badly.

Now on to the most important question of all: Does she wear extensions in her hair?

Absolutely.

But she sure is nice to look at, for it.