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Edited on Thu Oct-02-08 02:03 PM by Plaid Adder
For two reasons. No, three.
One: it's about damn time. Two: If Ifill does ask questions Palin can't answer, at least she can't whine about sexism (though it would be interesting to watch Palin try). And three: I think that Palin evokes a special kind of cold and beautiful righteous anger in professional women, and that this is why her interview with Katie Couric was such a frickin' disaster. I look forward to her meeting disaster again tonight, introduced to it by another woman journalist who understands and loathes everything that Palin's ascendency represents about the way the professions treat women.
Everyone seems to have been surprised that Palin couldn't handle an interview with Couric--probably most of all Palin's handlers, who undoubtedly set that up because they assumed Couric would toss her softballs. Couric doesn't have a reputation for being a hard-hitting journalist, despite being a major network news anchor, and in fact from the time she got the job to the present day nobody gave her credit for being qualified or able to do it. I personally thought it was a depressing comment on the dumbification of broadcast news--from Dan Rather to the perky morning host. So if I had a candidate who knew nothing and couldn't convincingly fake much, I'd probably have sent her to Couric first too, and hope they spent the whole time talking about celebrities and their favorite shoe stores.
Well, I underestimated Couric, apparently. But I understand exactly why she chose this particular moment to finally bring out the journalist chops she was apparently hiding all this time. Because all the things that her peers, supervisors, and viewers believed about Couric--she's just a pretty face, she's all surface and no substance, she's not ready for the big time, they gave her this job just because she's cute and looks good in a suit--are, when it comes to Palin, actually true. And I can completely see Couric sitting there at her desk prepping for this interview thinking, "If nothing else happens, I'm going to show these bastards the difference between a cute perky woman who CAN handle the big issues and a cute perky woman who clearly can't."
And this is, I believe, one major source of my strong, strong antipathy toward Palin--apart from the right-wing fundamentalist stuff, and the fact that she wants to take the right to choose away from PJ, and all that kind of thing. She *is* the woman that the sexist pigs we've all worked with start out assuming we will be--bubbly but vapid, cute but incompetent, pleasant to have around but incapable of handling any real responsibility. And what's worse, she encourages that perception, trades on it, exploits it, and uses it to sleaze her way into positions of power that she clearly should never have been given. She's good at three things, basically: 1) pretending to be sweet; 2) ripping the entrails out of her enemies; and 3) conning the powerful men around her into thinking that she's the greatest thing since sliced bread. The governing, not so much. If politics were a bad sci-fi movie, and Karl Rove was ordered to design an android fembot secret agent, she'd come out looking exactly like Palin. Or maybe Tina Fey dressed up as Palin.
So for a woman like Couric, or Ifill, before we even get to her ideological kit Palin is already a nemesis who needs to be brought down. And then we get to her positions on women's issues, and it only gets worse.
So, you know, the more her surrogates bitch about sexism hurting her in the media, the harder I laugh. Without sexism, she wouldn't be in this campaign in the first place. There were a lot of women in the Republican party who would be a lot better at either campaigning or governing than Palin is; they were passed over for Caribou Barbie because she's more telegenic. You can say, well, that's politics; I would answer yes, that's Rovian politics, and that means it's a strategy that includes exploiting the worst aspects of human nature, including the tendency to judge women based on their appearance rather than what lies beneath. And that form of sexism is the only thing that got her onto the ticket and it's the only thing keeping her there--because as we're finding out, what lies beneath is pretty embarrassing.
As for the "I'm voting for her because she's a mom like me!" thing...please. I am a mom now. That does not make me a magical and omnipotent being, and it doesn't make Sarah Palin one either. Being a mom has indeed changed my life. I'm a lot more organized and make better use of my time than I used to. Still. Am I any closer to being someone you'd want a heartbeat away from the presidency? No. Motherhood is a very difficult job which requires the investment of your entire emotional, intellectual, and spiritual being. But the skill set you develop is a little different from the one you'd need to run a country like the U.S.
Anyway. We're having our debate party, and it's going to consist of 5 women who got where they are in *spite* of that kind of sexism. (For those who helped with menu suggestions, thank you; we're doing 'barracuda' fish sticks, asparagus spears (if you work hard you can turn it into a reference to Bristol's pregnancy via Jamie Lynn Spears), chocolate moose, and moose bites (these are really chocolate haystacks, but they kind of look like they have antlers...and moose bites can be very dangerous, you know). And as long as civilization appears to be falling, I intend to enjoy what is certain to be a pretty good show.
C ya,
The Plaid Adder
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