Historic as the nomination of Barrak Obama as the first African-American presidential nominee by a major political party might be, in a number of respects this election and its primaries may end up highlighting attitudes about gender more than race—especially with the selection of Sarah Palin, the governor and Wonder Womban of Alaska, as John McCain’s VP.
This will be a little like running barefoot through a cow pasture in the dark, but I will venture a few thoughts on that premise and worry about washing my toes later.
CINDY: John McCain’s selection of Sarah Palin is quite in character for the professional POW. Will the women voters he hopes to attract see that? This is a guy who dumped his first wife who waited for him to come home, but not before dallying with some other ladies, one of whom had the inheritance income he was looking for. Cindy McCain is the reason for those seven multi-million dollar homes that McCain can’t seem to remember he owns. It is difficult to judge what it says of Cindy that she remains with a guy who referred to her in front of several member of the press as a four-letter crude word for a woman’s sex organ that causes both women and men to blush. The women I know and respect would have unmanned him in less time that it would have taken to repeat the rotten joke he told about Chelsea Clinton to a Republican audience: “Why is Chelsea Clinton so ugly? Her father is Janet Reno?” aking the opportunity to gleefully slur a cute, innocent young woman and lesbians. (One wonders if Republican “lovelies” like Mary Matalin, Bay Buchanan, Kay Bailey Hutchinson and Condolezza Rice, were among the gigglers.) Cindy must be more needy of that eighth house than her self-respect.
SARAH: Palin is an abortion opponent and, having eschewed the procedure to birth her Downs child (her fifth), will be anti-choicers poster girl. She made her choice, but doesn’t want other women to have a choice. She also wants Creationism taught in schools, the Alaskan Wildlife Preserve turned to Swiss cheese and, to know what the job of Vice President entails (because she admits to not knowing). Well, of course, with credits from being the mayor and beauty queen of an Alaskan “Podunk” and 18-months the governor for a state known for its political corruption, she obviously needs more than having been a heck of a “Political Science major in college.” Up there in the “coldest state, with the hottest governor” they like to refer to her comely looks as something to get those Ice Road Truckers and Deadliest Catch guys a little warm in the drawers. Somehow, by the end of the Republican convention (which might be saved from an appearance by George Bush, by hurricane Gustav), serial pregnancy will be fashioned into “appropriate experience” to be a “heartbeat away” from he Oval Office. One suspects that she is too dumb even to realize she is just another women being cynically used by John McCain. Even if she could see that, were she not “Madame Ovary,” the mother-of-five-anti-abortion candidate who sill solidify his appeal to the Far Right, he wouldn’t offer her a bite of his mooseburger if she were starving to death on the Iditerod trail.
And are Hillary’s feminists going to like those accolades? The question to be answered is how many women will fall for the cynical blandishments of a serial woman user. McCain is counting on women as being as compliant and stupid as his first wife, Cindy, and even Sarah Palin, appear to be. He’s counting on those wild-eyed, angry, Hillary-ites [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FVHZHuyVeio], one of whom looked suspiciously like Ann Coulter, to turn and vote for him while he insults their gender. Will those disaffected Hillary supporters take the bait? Or, will they see his windsock values on women’s choice, which he was once for, but now against? Will they want him to put the crucial Roe-rejecting justice on the Supreme Court? This will all be parsed to pieces in the next weeks.
HILLARY: The Republicans are already cynically making much of the fact that the Democrats didn’t put a woman on their ticket, but McCain has. Never mind why. Never mind how they went after Geraldine Ferraro. They were hoping that Hillary and Bill would blow up the Democratic Convention with a challenge. They were counting on Hillary being the “whiner” that Sarah Palin has called her. Hillary needed to be handled very carefully during and after the primary process. Even though the Clintons no longer run the Democratic Party, it appears that Hillary will be its maternal face. To her credit, she got on the team, pledged her support to Obama, and called for her supporters to do the same. It was power she earned and it was hers to dole out. The respect she was paid was as much to that power as to her gender. But we know Hillary Clinton—and Sarah Palin is no Hillary Clinton.
MICHELLE: Smart, self-possessed, extremely attractive, and eloquent. The mom of two cute daughters, she can give a stump speech with grace and power. Clearly, Michelle has the cred and the credentials to go beyond the reading to kindergartners, but the intelligence (now) to not show too much of her feelings. Everything about here says ,“This ‘girl’ can take care of herself.” And Barrack has no good reason to wander. A better case can be made for Michelle as a Vice President than the ex-mayor of Wasilla, Alaska.
Then there is the woman that most wouldn’t think if for this list; a woman who married and had a child by a Black man around 50 years ago.
MOMMA OBAMA: I feel for the mother of Barrak Obama. Obama is an “African-American” because in this country (and others) a drop of Negroid blood is considered enough to make that distinction. But when we see Obama family photos there is his mom, and there are Obama’s grandparents, incongruously as Caucasian as it gets. Somehow, in this cockeyed racist world, 50% of this guy—the part that is the beloved mother that raised him—doesn’t get recognized in his census definition. We don’t seem to have a way (other than Limbaugh’s clearly mean-spirited “Halfrican-American”) of expressing that this guy is really multi-racial.
So much was made of the necessity for Obama to “explain” himself to the voting public that seemed an oblique reference to the awkwardness in handling his racial composition. It is gratifying to see the pride African-Americans displayed at the convention, and the education, poise and eloquence of so many who addressed it. Barrak Obama is, to anyone with half a working brain, the man who has the intelligence, grace, and charisma to rescue our country from the disaster of eight years of George Bush and the Republicans. Momma Obama deserves some credit for that.
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© 2008, James A. Clapp (UrbisMedia Ltd. Pub. 9.1.2008)