BlogWonks

Part of it seems to be (and not just on the part of women) that some people look at politics like they look at sports. People mostly cheer for a team just because it’s from their state or their alma mater, regardless of its actual qualities or the character of its members. In sports, this is fine, but we shouldn’t be gushing over Sarah Palin just because she’s the candidate who managed to get our party’s VP nomination.

But for women in particular, I think that Republican feminists finally have a role model. Most of the prominent women who promoted the “you can have it all” myth have been leftists, with good reason: conservatives know you can’t have it all. Phyllis Schafly and Margaret Thatcher didn’t make the grade because they raised their children first and had an illustrious career after the kids were grown. Condi Rice understood that she was going to have to choose between the kind of career she wanted and a family, and she made the sacrifice instead of having children and forcing them to make the sacrifices.

Not Sarah Palin. Teenagers with proper supervision, and with healthy relationships with their parents, generally don’t get pregnant. And why aren’t her parents encouraging her to give it up for adoption instead of raising it herself when she’s not even grown up herself yet? And is anyone really sufficiently detached from reality to imagine that a woman can raise a newborn and hold a responsible job at the same time?

There is a lot to like about Sarah Palin. It’s hard not to like a woman who’s in favor of guns and capital punishment and against abortion. But every time I find myself warming up to her, I hear something else I can’t live with. She dismissed the gubernatorial chef, a traditional perk of the job, on the grounds that she wanted to do the cooking herself and her kids were old enough to make their own sandwiches.

No doubt this was a nice publicity stunt for the sake of idiots who think politicians should pretend to be “just plain folks”. But at what cost to her helpless children?

Now, of course, she has at least one who definitely isn’t. And another is six. Is a six-year-old really to be trusted with making her own sandwiches? In any case, children deserve real food, not sandwiches they make themselves. They have a mother who’s too busy fulfilling herself to properly nourish them, and when another responsible adult was available to prepare real food, their mother deprived them of that. Malnourishment is the cause of most of today’s health problems and I suspect of many of the neuroses and delinquency that have reached historically unprecedented prominence in this age, and here a governor and prospective Vice President is encouraging this trend.

Republican women think that Palin is a role model, but so far as I can see, her example is going to be a bad one indeed.