“If she were president, she’d be Baberaham Lincoln.”
posted by Kaimipono D. Wenger
According to Google News, there are almost 500 news stories that match the query “Palin & pageant.” Everyone from Newsweek to the Wall Street Journal is writing about Palin’s beauty-pageant past. The pageant picture is making the rounds, all bare shoulders and big hair. The New York Daily News, in an attempt to reach a new low, is speculating that Palin’s ravishing good looks may distract Joe Biden from debating her on the issues.
And there are already numerous references everywhere to the Wayne’s World line, “If she were president, she’d be Baberaham Lincoln.” (Including this one, linked by NRO’s The Corner.)
This is all pretty much the opposite of the reaction to Hillary Clinton, of whom Drudge famously asked, “are we really ready for an ugly, old, woman president?”
Two women feature prominently in this campaign season. One is portrayed as the shrill bitch, the ugly old woman (thanks, Drudge), the (gasp!) pantsuit wearer. The other gets 500 stories about how much of a hottie she is. (Questions about her tenuous grasp on U.S. history receive a tiny fraction of the airplay given to the fact that she was miss congeniality.)
We’ve clearly arrived in post-feminist utopia, and everyone can stop worrying and go home.
September 1, 2008 at 3:53 pm
Posted in: Politics
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Responses (6)
Dan Filler - September 1, 2008 at 10:59 pm
Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that a candidate that mocked Chelsea Clinton for being ugly (and Janet Reno for appearing masculine) would pick a beauty queen!
Dan Filler - September 1, 2008 at 11:00 pm
Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that a candidate who mocked Chelsea Clinton for being ugly (and Janet Reno for appearing masculine) would pick a beauty queen!
Miriam Cherry - September 2, 2008 at 1:37 am
“We’ve clearly arrived in post-feminist utopia, and everyone can stop worrying and go home.”
Er, no…. tempting as a way to end the post, but a bit too glib.
The focus on the looks, rather than qualifications, of the female candidates is the tip-off that we (feminists) can’t go home.
When I see McCain and Obama in bathing suits then we can stop worrying and go home.
Or maybe we’ll just worry all the more.
How’s that for glib?
Kaimi - September 2, 2008 at 2:59 am
I wasn’t sure _how_ to end it, Miriam. My early draft was much more of a rant. But really, I don’t know that a rant is necessary. The facts sort of frame themselves. So I decided to just close with obvious sarcasm. Yeah, we’ve still got a long way to go — and this historic election just highlights the distance that remains.
Rachel Cohen - September 2, 2008 at 11:01 am
Not to be rude, but that’s not “big hair” as was popular in the 80′s, Texas and New Jersey.
A.W. - September 2, 2008 at 2:36 pm
Well, first, bluntly, she is a hottie. And i am rational enough to say that, and then step back and analyze whether she would be a good president regardless. Will there be a few guys who will vote for McCain because his veep is hot. Who knows. but rational people can ignore her looks, and vote for or agaisnt her.
Hillary clinton’s claim of experience was always ridiculous. My wife is a CNA. I am a lawyer. I don’t care how long we are together, I will never be qualified to treat a patient and my wife will never be qualified to represent a client. So being Bill Clinton’s wife is not good preparation for the Presidency.
Neither is being senator. You know what is? administrative experience. Over at the corner they crunched the numbers and found that out of the 5 president considered best by historians, 4 had significant administrative experience. Likewise of the 5 worst, only one did. Now the big exception among the best was Abraham Lincoln, but if you go by the numbers (and the corner goes deeper into this than I am right now), you have to conclude that with Lincoln it was a case of luck rather than intelligence that we picked the best possible candidate.
That only verifies what is intuitively true. Being Governor, for instance, is virtually the same job as being president, only on a smaller scale. By comparison, a senator does something very different: they run their mouths and vote now and then. The end.
Not that Palin has as much experience as i would like, but she has more relevant experience than all of the other candidates, including McCain. If we think experience means more than merely how many years you can count since your first birthday, that puts her ahead of the game.
Besides, and this is the really sexist part. Am I hearing members of the same party that nominated John Edwards as Vice President in 2004, and Barrack Obama this time around, complaining about a lack of experience? Or, for that matter, why aren’t these men dismissed merely as pretty faces with silver tongues?
Indeed many of the people pushing her attractiveness as an issue is on the same left that calls those two male politicians dreamy. Sullivan has been calling her a former beauty pageant winner in a derisive way. Kos kids are searching for a picture of her in a bikini, to demean her. But who exactly thought it demeaned Obama to appear in his swimsuit? And don’t even get me started about Edwards and his primped out hair.
Even this blog post joins in. You snidely link to potentially incorrect understanding of history (you could argue that she was merely saying they were fighting for America “under God” rather than for the pledge to be that way). But where is the references from Obama claiming that he had travelled in all 57 states, or naming a city as a state? Which is a bigger deal? To be confused about America’s past or its present?
And indeed, the left in general seems to already be absolute deranged about this, as with the example of the silly theory that Palin’s child was not even really her child.
I have seen this sort of thing so often i can say as a rule that nothing drives the left crazier than a sexy conservative woman. Witness only the piggishness displayed toward Michelle Malkin and Ann Coulter–always mixed with a certain amount of sexual wish-fulfillment–and you start to see a pattern.
So the point is, yes, there is alot of sexism going around. But these days most of it seems to come from the left.
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