Sarah Palin is unqualified. She is at a minimum intellectually incurious. She is unethical. And calling these things for what they are is not an anti-feminist act. Nor is Sarah Palin the individual the real issue.
This can be a delicate question because qualified, honorable women have so often been called unqualified and attacked for their ambition or assertiveness. But...c'mon. Sarah Palin's lack of qualification for high elected office is so patently clear in just about every one of her public statements and actions over the past 10 months that to not call it out as such is offensive to women (and men) who have worked hard to develop knowledge and mastery of any skill or body of knowledge. Of course there are lines of brutal personal attack that should never be crossed. But it's not productive either to nutpick or to try to establish equivalencies. The question here is whether it is legitimate to call out the lack of qualification of a female politician for the role to which she aspires, and the answer is a clear yes.
Yet this idea persists, that we have to be somehow gentle with Palin because it would be sexist to call her for what she is: A national political figure of perhaps-unprecedented lack of qualification, thoughtfulness, or respect for the obligations of office. Back in the fall, we repeatedly saw the notion that if Joe Biden campaigned against her aggressively, he would suffer for the appearance of beating up on a helpless girl. Much more recently, Peter Daou has compared Palin's treatment to that of his former employer, Hillary Clinton. This seems like a terrible insult to Clinton, who was attacked more pervasively, more personally, and by more prominent people over a period of more than a decade despite -- and this is crucial -- being a qualified, honorable person.
Of course, Palin has been criticized and mocked. But although she is criticized and mocked, she is also on many levels taken seriously as a national political figure. The discussion of her recognizes some of her shortcomings without connecting the dots to say what should be clear to even the most actual observer: Sarah Palin is not on the same continuum of qualification as almost any other national-level politician. (George W. Bush may represent the more-qualified end of the continuum on which Palin exists -- and it is to the traditional media's shame and the nation's detriment that he wasn't called out for what he was earlier and more clearly. Michele Bachmann's on there somewhere too.)
But restricting this discussion to Palin herself misses the larger point -- why are we talking about her?
Sarah Palin got to the governorship of Alaska on her own. At that point, political geeks and people in Alaska knew who she was, and that was about it. Palin became a national figure because John McCain selected her as his running mate. Why did he select her as his running mate, despite having barely spoken to her and not having vetted her? Because she was a woman. Because she would shake things up and get attention and seem unexpected. Out of the hope that PUMAs would flock to her. Because, more generally, the McCain campaign hoped that having a woman on the ticket would be an adequate stand-in for taking issue positions that women would vote for.
That's where the real and massive sexism in how Palin has been treated lies, and while she was certainly affected by it, the real victims are women who have worked hard to get somewhere in politics, and women voters who were assumed by a major party presidential nominee to be stupid enough to vote for a woman without consideration of her positions.
There are plenty of Republican women who would have been reasonable choices for vice president. I would still disagree with almost all of their positions, but see them as competent and qualified. But they, for one reason or another, apparently didn't measure up. And we can find hints of why that is in votes like the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, on which the four Republican women in the Senate voted yes while the 36 men voted no. Those qualified women didn't pass wingnut muster. Sarah Palin did.
So, yeah. As long as Republicans choose to elevate women based on the hope that voters will be fooled into thinking that woman on ticket = policy stances friendly to women, families, and working people, it is not only not sexist to call that out for what it is, it's sexist not to.
Sadly, this is a question relevant not only to Palin; Republicans are not averse to running this play again and again. So we're told by Republican commentators that, in New Hampshire, Kelly Ayotte is a particularly strong candidate because she's a mother of young children, that Ayotte, like Palin, is a strong candidate because she's an outsider, because:
Like Obama, they don't have to talk the talk of change. They are change.
That is what Republicans want us to believe, that policies don't matter, that tokenism produces meaningful change. We see it too with RNC chair Michael Steele -- Republicans responding to the election of an African American president by getting an African American spokesperson of their own...and not changing a thing about the policies that lead on the order of 90% of African American voters to vote for Democrats even when Barack Obama is not on the ticket.
If we pull back from criticizing the tokens Republicans throw up to stand in the way of real change, we legitimize the strategy. In discussing -- mocking, criticizing -- the tokens themselves, we of course must be respectful of their humanity, and should always remember that the individual is not the real issue. But unqualified is unqualified, unethical is unethical, bad on the issues is bad on the issues, and it would be a disservice to the nation not to say so.