Sexism and the McCain-Palin Candidacy

The depth of the modern Republican Party’s cynicism is news to nobody. So its nominee’s surprise choice for the vice presidency should not be a surprise.  

Forty years ago, the party, whose delegates at last week’s convention so avidly claimed the iconic mantle of Abraham Lincoln, the party of slave and abolitionist Frederick Douglass, Abe’s uncommon colleague in Emancipation, surely sent those men spinning in their graves when it avidly began courting the sons and daughters of the Confederacy, many of whom still thought John Wilkes Booth was a hero and Douglass just another "uppity n****r."

The "Southern Strategy" dog-whistled and otherwise wormed its way into the hearts of people whose families had long vowed never to vote for a Republican, people who had cheered the Democrat, Governor George Wallace, when he stood against the majority of his own party and invoked those immortal if-since-repented words: segregation now, segregation forever.

It didn’t matter whether the individuals engaged in this GOP blueprint were "personally racist," whether they actively felt people of color were inferior and unworthy, just as it didn't matter whether Wallace did. What mattered was that they capitalized on fear and ignorance and prejudice and tradition and hatred in adopting a path to political victory by implying – to a specific cohort of voters, not all of whom lived in the South – that they would achieve or maintain the racial divide and white privilege in the post-Jim Crow era. Personally racist or not, they were racist in their goals and achievements, just as ruthlessly if not so blatantly as Wallace himself, who once promised after a campaign loss never to be "out-n****red" again.

The cynicism that led to the "Southern Strategy" is not the identical cynicism that chose Sarah Palin as John McCain’s running mate. But it contains the same DNA. It springs from the same do-any-unprincipled-thing-to-win-and-keep-winning-no-matter-what philosophy, the political gene that has guided too many politicians, modern and ancestral.

The party that defeated the Equal Rights Amendment, that has whittled away women’s reproductive choices for 35 years, that obstructs gender pay equity, despises sports equity, worked to sabotage affirmative action, objects to guaranteed family leave, panders to right-wing religionists’ views of women, wants to invade women's privacy, thinks violence against women isn’t worthy of legislation, and embraces almost every opportunity to maintain the "traditional" role for women in society, now dares present itself as the party of feminist enlightenment.

The Republican party cries "sexism!" no matter what specific criticism is raised against its choice for the person whose chief job is to wait in the foyer of the White House in case something bad should happen to a man who has a 1 in 6 actuarial chance of dying in the next four years. Men like Rudy Guiliani and John McCain, who treat women like dogs and call them names to match, suddenly talk as if they were weaned by Germaine Greer. If cynicism were scented, the stench from this ploy could make us energy independent.

Let me be clear. Numerous attacks on Sarah Palin have been sexist. We expect this from Republicans, from unreconstructed Democrats, from the Rush Limbaughs, Dr. Lauras, Sean Hannitys, Bill O’Reillys and Chris Matthewses. We expect this from the megamedia. Reuters sent out a photo that was nothing more than the back of the candidate from the hems of her knee-length skirt to her high heels, captioning it "Sarah Palin stands on stage."

But these expected attacks are less infuriating than those which come from progressives. You don’t have to dig far into progressive wwwLand to find sexism writ small and large in everything from adolescent jokes to rape fantasies directed at Governor Palin, and slut-shaming directed at her daughter. People say she committed child abuse by not getting an abortion, that she’s had too many children, that she’s a bimbo or a baby doll, that she looks like a porn star, that her hair is all wrong. As Doctor Science, a Diarist here at Daily Kos wrote, there has just been too much about her anatomy and physiology, her attractiveness, her clothing, her hair and cosmetics, and "anything that can be abbreviated ‘I.L.F’."

This sexism – some progressives will say it is not sexism – has played right into the hands of cynical Republicans more effectively than they probably expected. To deflect attention away from their 90% Man – the "maverick" who has cast 9 out of 10 votes the past eight years the way Mister George W. Bush wanted him to - they chose Palin. She can actually claim to be more of a maverick than McCain but still lines up on issues that matter to a certain group of disaffected voters whom the 90% Man and the rest of the GOP are dog-whistling.

They chose a creationist-backing, choice-denying, gay-rejecting, middle-class-wrecking, environment-ignoring, secession-promoting, right-wing religionist and second-string rookie who is so gravely unprepared for the job for which she has been selected out of the blue that she must be kept under wraps except when delivering a script. A candidate who stands against nearly everything progressives have fought for the past half-century, and mostly probably – like the 90% Man himself – against the FDR legacy itself. Whatever her back-story, Palin epitomizes the mind-set and policy approach that we must defeat. Not only is McCain-Palin dead-wrong on most issues, they are wrong on so-called women’s issues, which are, in fact, human rights issues. And yet the addition of Palin to the ticket is seen by some, even some alleged liberals, as some hallelujah breaking down of barriers.

At first, and something that set the tone, too much progressive discussion fell right into the trap the GOP had set: "We’ll pick her and then cry foul when they criticize her because you should never hit a lady." Bullshit, of course. A Governor Sam Palin with Sarah’s record would not have collected the Republican and punditry wows that she has. Sam would have been reamed on experience and record from Day One and, except for a few folks calling him a "hunk," the sexism and invasion of personal decisions would have been left out of it.

Thankfully, many progressives on and off the blogs did not fall for the trap. They immediately went about conducting the vetting process that the McCain team apparently didn’t care about in its desperation to inject some pizzazz into the boring, outdated and unpopular same old, same old that now characterizes the pallid Grand Old Party. Along with all the personal stuff, the wretchedness of Palin’s record and views came quickly to light. The process of finding more continues.

Sadly, some unknown number of Democrats, and newly minted ex-Democrats, are saying they are strongly thinking about voting for McCain-Palin or have already decided to do so because for them gender trumps all. They are beyond angry over what they perceive as the unfair, sexist treatment of Hillary Clinton. How many of them are Republican agents provocateurs is also unknown, of course, but there is no doubt that some have been, as they claim, Democrats all their lives.

Many people think Clinton should have gotten the nomination. And many think she got shafted out of it. But most don’t see the 90% Man and his running mate as an antidote to that happenstance. They’re still disappointed, perhaps still angry, but not willing to visit Pyrrhic vengeance on the nation, on their daughters and granddaughters, by voting for this pair.

As for those who are, electing a woman matters more than anything else. More than anything else. More than human rights, more than reproductive rights, more than civil rights and civil liberties, more than gay rights, more than economics, the environment, foreign policy, health care, education, more than separation of church and state. Any woman. Those who would vote for her solely because she has a vagina don’t seem to care what her tenure would mean beyond the mere shattering of the so-called final pane of the glass ceiling.

Those who say they will support Sarah Palin because she will represent an advance for women, that she will make life easier and better in the future for women are not just wrongheaded, but insulting to all who have fought sexism in all its guises in the past. They are insulting their own struggles and, indeed, the very candidacy of the woman, Hillary Clinton, who so many millions supported.

Because, in one way after another, Sarah Palin epitomizes the sexism that still plagues us. She would no more advance the cause of women than if she were Phyllis Schlafly, who, by the way, thinks she is a wonderful choice. They believe that it makes more sense to vote for the 90% Man because he picked Sarah Palin for his running mate than for Barack Obama because he didn’t choose Hillary Clinton for his.

Some will say I am talking out of my ass. I’m not a woman, so what do I know? True enough. I do not pretend to come close to understanding the daily frustrations and fury and resentment that sexism imposes on our society. But I do know how sexism shaped and constrained my mother, how, in some of the same ways in a different era, it shaped and constrained my wife, and how it continues to shape and constrain my daughter.

Born into deep poverty, her sister and herself victims of incest, an unwed mother at 14 and again at 16, my mother faced the triple whammy of classism, sexism and racism. Yet she found the strength as a single mom before that term had appeared in the sociology texts to leave her roots and move halfway across the country, hiring out first as washer and ironer of other family’s clothes, then moving to a low-paying clerk’s job which barely paid the bills while she managed to enhance her 8th-grade education with a GED. She married a man who emotionally and financially supported her goals of attending the business school of a university at the dawn of the 1960s, when, unlike today, older non-traditional students (she was 32) were rare and ridiculed.

The first day of class, one male accounting professsor, eyes focused on my mother – the only female of 50-some students in the room – opined loudly that women had no head for business and no place in it other than as secretaries. She graduated with, at that time, the highest grade point average previously seen at the business school, a single B in four years. From then on, she was given repeated awards and honors as an educator, took on extra tasks including supervision of an experimental public school sex education program, but was repeatedly passed over for a principalship in the two school districts where she taught for 24 years until her early retirement for health reasons. My mom would no more have voted for McCain-Palin than if the ticket were Bush-Palin.  

Her experience is not the experience of lots of women of today, although my wife has seen younger, less experienced men that she trained promoted above her, and my daughter has faced some skepticism in her pursuit of science. Nonetheless, despite profound opposition, barriers have been toppled in nearly every realm. Laws that made women second-class citizens have been repealed or superseded. Traditions that kept them "in their place" have been widely repudiated. In business, in education, in medicine, in law, in politics, women hold positions of real power and authority, and they are, ever so slowly, changing the old attitudes.

Sexism has not, obviously, been ended. The journey toward gender equity is far from over. Whether it’s 70 cents on the dollar, or a system where abortion is legal but unavailable in 87% of the counties of the country, whether it’s an assertive woman being called "shrill," or too aggressive while a similarly behaving man is called a go-getter, whether it’s imagery in advertising sometimes more grotesquely misogynist than 30 years ago, there’s still plenty of correction needed.

A McCain-Palin presidency would do zero in that regard. The 90% Man and his right-wing ticket mate would continue creating more of the damage visited on the country for the past eight years. Damage across a broad range of issues, even if the policies are dressed in new shoes. That is the message that most progressives are delivering, and they are doing so simply by investigating and presenting the records and publicly known views of these candidates.

But that is not the only message being heard. There is also the reinforcing of sexist and crude stereotypes of women with Sarah Palin as the target. We still live in a society where the claim that somebody said "Sambo beat the bitch" is instantly reviled as racist, but that so few see as sexist. We still live in a situation where some progressives unwittingly join with the right wing in making a joke of sexist imagery and practices. Where some see criticism of sexism as puritanical criticism of sexuality. Where it is denied that men still have privileges because they are men while women are denied them because they are women.

True progressives don’t want to live in such a society. We know that electing McCain-Palin will delay the day when that society comes to be. We need to remember that buying into the game-plan of that ticket by engaging in sexism ourselves has the same postponing effect.