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Thursday night, this election was ours to win.
We were focused on the stark differences between what has happened in the last eight years and what will happen once Obama is elected President. We were ready for a new type of politics. We were proud of our nominee and proud of the running mate he chose, and over the course of the convention we had regained the spirit of unity and the faith that our message would resonate throughout the country.
But when I woke up yesterday afternoon, things looked very different.
It is obvious that John McCain's choice of Governor Palin as his running mate was pandering, both to women and to the conservative base of the Republican party. In that, it was a better choice than even Mike Huckabee could have been, with the added bonus that Governor Palin had said very little about her policies on record -- she can invent herself as the campaign goes. And it was bait.
Bait which I have seen taken by many people on this forum hook, line, and sinker.
There are many reasons why McCain/Palin is a much worse ticket than Obama/Biden when you look at policy and experience. Palin even flip-flopped on the fabled "Bridge to Nowhere" -- first supporting the project, then saying that since Congress wouldn't pay for it all that it shouldn't be done, and then in her acceptance speech today saying that "In fact, I told Congress thanks, but no thanks, on that "bridge to nowhere." If our state wanted a bridge, I said, we'd build it ourselves." That's a far cry from her press release which said "Despite the work of our congressional delegation, we are about $329 million short of full funding for the bridge project, and it’s clear that Congress has little interest in spending any more money on a bridge between Ketchikan and Gravina Island." She would have been perfectly happy to have the bridge if Congress would have paid for it, unlike what she is saying now. There is the ethics scandal which has not yet finished its investigation, despite her claims of wide-sweeping ethics reform in Alaska. Let's see how long it takes her to decide that John McCain is right about tax breaks to oil companies after deciding to tax oil industries strongly in Alaska, generate a surplus, and give that money back to the people.
Instead of looking at those issues, however, we took the bait.
Yes, she's brought up the fact that she is a woman in politics, with a family, religious, and pro-life. And that was the bait.
It doesn't matter that many conservatives feel that a mother's primary job should be being a mother, and so by taking on the second-most demanding job in the world she is betraying that ideal and therefore being a hypocrite. We are being hypocrites if we want equal pay for equal work, family and medical leave, and no discrimination against women who are pregnant, nursing, or raising a family, but would even consider the fact that she has five children in deciding whether she is qualified to be vice-president.
It matters even less that Dr. Laura's "I am my kids mom" meme is viral among social conservatives, and so by choosing to pursue the second-most demanding job in the world instead of primarily being "her kids mom" she is betraying that ideal and therefore being a hypocrite. We are being hypocrites if we say we believe that a woman can have both a career and a family and do well at both, but would even consider judging her parenting because she also wants to have a career.
It really, truly does not matter in the slightest that she has chosen to have a child later in life when having children later in life increases the risk of Down's Syndrome, and uses the fact that she did not choose abortion when presented with a poor prenatal diagnosis as a demonstration of her true pro-life stance. This is a point you can't even call her a hypocrite on, because she has walked her talk. She is married (to a man), many religious social conservatives believe that the purpose of the marriage bed is to conceive children, the whole pro-life message is that if a child is conceived that it should be given every chance to live no matter what, and that a handicapped child is just as worthy of that protection as a "normal" child. It doesn't matter that she wants to take away from a woman the choice to make a different decision in family planning than she did. We are being hypocrites if we judge her choices about family planning when we want the right to make our own decisions.
We cannot be hypocrites if we want to win this election.
There's one other thing that we can't do if we want to win this election, and I don't even think McCain considered that we might do so when he chose Governor Palin to be the bait for all of the above.
We can't stoop lower than the Republicans and PUMAs by conspiracy theories, tinfoil-hattery, suggestions of sexual scandals, and bringing relatives who aren't running for election into the picture.
It is totally shameful and ludicrous that people latched on to the idea that Barack Obama is a closet Muslim, schooled by a madrassa, with a falsified birth certificate and not technically a citizen because while he was a minor his mother married a man from Indonesia, moved there, and the man adopted him. It was ludicrous for anyone to believe that Michelle Obama is an unpatriotic reverse-racist who dragged Barack to the oh-so-horrible-and-reverse-racist-and-America-hating Trinity United Church of Christ church and went on a "whitey" rant on camera. Yet people believed (and sadly, some still do believe) that all of that is true based on innuendo, questionable sources, and no evidence.
But you know what's lower than that?
Suggesting that because Sarah Palin is a slender woman who didn't make it obvious that she was pregnant by wearing clothing that specifically emphasized her "bump", didn't immediately sound trumpets to call angels and media to witness that "Lo, a 40-something woman has conceived!", continued working throughout her pregnancy, went to a work-related function when she wasn't expecting to deliver her baby for another month, decided she could give her speech and not let the fact that she had just started leaking a small amount of amniotic fluid stop her from that when if needed she could be at a hospital within an hour or two, called her doctor after the speaking engagement to find out if she should go to the hospital down there immediately or if she could fly back home to have her own doctor deliver her child, with her doctor's permission decided to fly home to have her baby, and was back to work three days later, meant that her sixteen-year-old daughter who wasn't as slender as she was and had mononucleosis during the last months of her pregnancy had to be the actual mother of the baby.
Those who actually believe this tinfoil-hattery -- have you even considered that she conceived during her first term as the first governor of a conservative state and didn't want there to be a public impression that she couldn't continue to do her job as the state's chief executive? That she didn't want to deal with the possible backlash that she is dealing with now about her choice to be a mother and also have a career until she absolutely had to? That many women don't announce to the world that they're pregnant until the first trimester is over because the first trimester is when most miscarriages occur? That even if you are a "walk the talk" person when it comes to your pro-life stance that dealing with a poor prenatal diagnosis is gut-wrenching and that might have contributed to her desire not to advertise her fecundity? That not all women grow as big as a house during pregnancy, that women who "carry high" don't look as pregnant as those who "carry low", that Down's Syndrome babies often are low-birth-weight for gestational age, and that she didn't even get to full term???
That's not even getting into the medical management of her pregnancy. While I may not be a doctor, my ex-husband was an OB-GYN, and a slow leak of clear amniotic fluid is not nearly as immediate of a medical emergency as a gush of meconium-stained fluid. If you really want to get into the nitty-gritty on that I'll be happy to discuss it, but for now let's remember that most Democrats believe that a woman's medical care should be between her and her doctor and others should not second-guess it.
Yes, we are all disappointed that the accusations against John Edwards about having an affair were true, but just as in the Clenis-issues, the talk we have used is that an affair is not really the public's business. Yes, it sucked that he lied, but does that mean we shouldn't have given him the benefit of the doubt when the accusations came up, or that his affair would have made him a worse president? In my opinion, the answer to both of those questions is a resounding "No." Just because we are disappointed in the fact someone we trusted lied does not mean that all politicians lie and that all accusations against them are true.
In this case, the accusation is as much against her daughter as it is her -- a girl who never chose to run for public office, or make an issue of her moral authority. A child. Sure, it may fit the viwepoint of our party that abstinence-only education is a failure, but there is no proof of it, and until there is this kind of accusation is just as bad, if not worse, than suggesting that the grown wife of a presidential candidate is a rabid reverse-racist who went on a "whitey" rant.
And as for the person on here who asked if Down's Syndrome was more prevalent in "interfamily relationships"...
That is like suggesting that Chelsea was the one who wore the blue dress and Monica was framed to protect Bill.
We are Democrats. We are supposed to be the Good Guys. We are not supposed to be hypocrites. This is lower than even the Republicans and PUMAs have gone.
This is now our election to lose. And we will, if this kind of thing keeps up.
Please make me eat my words to my Republican coworkers. Please don't screw this up for Barack and Joe. Please don't screw this up for our country.
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