You knew it would happen. It took mere political moments for horrified Democrats around the nation to find sexist, elitist, and downright crazy ways to attack Senator McCain's VP-designate, Alaska Governor Sarah Palin.
Although few knew her before last Friday, she has emerged as clearly the coolest Republican that ever lived. She hunts and fishes, her husband is a snow-mobile champion, she's a marathoner and a union member, kicked the crap out of the Alaska GOP on principle, has a son going to Iraq, and was known on her high school basketball team as "Sarah Barracuda" for her tenacity and grit. She even played with a fractured ankle once--and helped win the game, anyway. She eats moose and caribou, brings her 5-month old baby to work with her, and (unlike McCain) can multi-task with baby and blackberry.
It's time to white out all those "Chuck Norris" and "Fred Thompson" jokes and write-in "Sarah Palin." She makes Arnold Schwarzennegar look like Pat Boone.
First, it was the campaign itself, risking its newly-minted image as the party of middle class, small-town voters, by sniffing:
Today, John McCain put the former mayor of a town of 9,000 with zero foreign policy experience a heartbeat away from the presidency.
Slightly later in the day, The One himself (and his running mate--let's call him "The Other") then quickly tried to mute the campaign's heavy-handedness with a pretense of politeness:
"We send our congratulations to Governor Sarah Palin and her family on her designation as the Republican nominee for vice president. It is yet another encouraging sign that old barriers are falling in our politics," the statement said."
But the game was already on. Obama/Biden fears and despises this ticket, because it one-ups them on several fronts.
First, and most deliciously, it provides one person out of four in the race that actually has some executive experience--some real, hands-on, decision-making, voter-serving, budget-crafting, making-it-work executive chops. Obama, Biden, and McCain have never done any of that. They've never run a company, much less a city or a state. They've always been one of one-hundred, individually accountable to no one, and ultimately responsible for nothing. McCain's character, at least, has been forged in the fires of adversity, in the Hanoi Hilton. So we know a bit about his intestinal fortitude.
All we know about the courage quotient on the other ticket is that Joe Biden rides the Amtrak, and Barack Obama made a speech four years ago.
Then there is the "woman thing," so to speak. While the Obama campaign couldn't find any qualified woman he liked and trusted enough to be his number two (go away, Hillary), in a party so woman-centered it requires by rule that the majority of convention delegates be women, McCain effortlessly discovered one last February, and esteemed her enough to put her in the mix. And, as time went on, it was her scrappy life story, her heart, and her values that kept her in there--not her gender.
Because we now know that, in this most intense competition she held her own with all the media's darling front-runners, and made the cut at every turn.
And now the Democrats are wailing like banshees, because that was Hillary's historical moment. It's bad enough that Hillary couldn't close the deal for the top of the ticket--but to be shown up by (gag) Republicans in their open-mindedness and egalitarian feminism!
It is a most miserable day for the Democrats--cheered only by the prospect of a killer hurricane coming to wipe out the RNC convention and showcase the "compassion" of Democrats.
The attacks on the remarkable Sarah Palin have come quickly and ruthlessly, and some of them are some of the starkest examples of lift-wing hypocrisy anyone's seen in years. Let us first look at who she really is, before we put on our hazmat suits and wade into what the Democrats are trying to do to her.
Her political experience (she was on the City Council while Barack was a "community organizer"--one of those people that hoped and prayed that Aldermen and mayors would look kindly on his petitions for help, or at least not wreck his plans) is dismissed as "mayor of a town of 9000." Barack entered the state senate in 1997--a beneficiary of the Chicago political machine, and a ruthless player, having eliminated all his opposition on a technicality, including the woman who made it possible for him to run in the first place.
By 1997, Sarah Palin was in her second year as mayor. By the time young Barack Obama keynoted the Democratic National Convention in 2004, while running to be a first-term Senator, Palin had been term-limited out of her two as mayor, having not only cut her own salary while in office, but taxes by 40%.
By 2004, she had already resigned as Ethics Commissioner of Alaska's Oil and Gas Commission, objecting to the Commission's lack of ethics. When Obama was taking his oath of office, Sarah Palin was driving the resignation of the State Party Chairman from the Commission and the Attorney General from office.
On February 10 of 2007, Obama announced his run for president, effectively ending his attention to the Senate (having been in the Senate barely 2 years). (For example, from September to November of 2007, he missed 80% of Senate votes.)
While Obama was missing votes, Sarah Palin was racking up an 80% approval rating as governor and fighting corruption in the Alaska Republican party. Obama, for all his time in one of the most corrupt political clubs in the nation--the Chicago Democratic machine--never saw fit to challenge it at all.
But the women of the Democratic party are losing their minds. How dare this person call herself a woman! How dare any woman disagree with their pro-abortion, anti-family agenda!
Kim Gandy of NOW called Palin "a woman who opposes women's rights," failing to see that not every woman in America believes that it is a "right" to kill an unborn child. Palin is, in fact, a woman who has paved the way for other women, holding challenging jobs usually reserved for men, while raising a family as well.
The Democrats don't know what to do with themselves. The Republican party has shown them up for the ideologues that they are. The Republican party has nominated a woman more qualified than the Democrats' ticket-topper, without making an 18-month long giant deal about her gender. It has, instead, allowed its candidate to select her on her merits. She is not a crony, and she is not a Washington insider. She promises to bring no state of any electoral heft, nor does she come to the position after years of thirsting to be president.
He has found a woman called by duty to do what's right, and willing to set aside her interests for those of the country.
It's a tremendous coup for the GOP. In their eagerness to quell excitement, the donkey party and its minions have already insulted small towns, women in general, mothers, Alaska--anything they can think of.
First, there is the "why did she have a Down Syndrome baby?" argument (which we've already seen in this very forum.) That seems to take as its base that it is her own fault--she was too busy, she should have stayed home, she should have told people she was pregnant, she shouldn't have flown in the last moments of her pregnancy, and on and on and on--that the baby was born with DS.
But there are no facts to this argument, since the Palins knew very early on what the circumstances of their child were to be, and they made the decision to trust God and act out out of love, instead of fear.
Then there is the appalling rumor spread across the lefty blogosphere that five-month old Trig belonged not to Sarah, but to Bristol (some comments have even insinuated that the father is shipping-off-to-Iraq Track, or maybe even the handsome Todd [her father--there is very little that is too abhorrent for the imaginations of these cretins to entertain.])
Of course, now that we know that Bristol is pregnant and engaged, the timeline rules out the possibility that Trig was borne by Bristol. So much for leftist logic.
But if it's not enough to attack her for confusing you with her family, what next? I know--attack her for not being attentive enough to her family! After all, shouldn't conservatives want her to stay home with that baby?
Sally Quin flutters and clucks over Palin's failure to live up to the lifestyle rules she thinks Palin is supposed to play by as an evangelical. (Palin, by the way, is a Pentecostal, not a fundamentalist, and not a Baptist, from whose annals Quinn chooses the requirements to assign the Governor). Then she assigns Palin to monitor her soon-to-be-a-grown-and-married-woman daughter, essentially forever:
And now we learn the 17-year-old daughter, Bristol, is pregnant. She and the father of the child plan to marry. This may be a hard one for the Republican conservative family-values crowd to swallow. Of course, this can happen in any family. But it must certainly raise the question among the evangelical base about whether Sarah Palin has been enough of a hands-on mother.
Nice feminism, there, Madame Quinn.
Once again, liberals misread the people they most despise, Christian conservatives. Christian conservative women do not live in electricity-free huts, barefoot and pregnant, chained to the stove, waiting for heaven. They are all around you, working in the home and out, and many are twice as smart as any network news anchor parroting DNC talking points from behind a desk.
"Being a mother" does not have to mean staying home all the time, particularly when one's husband is already doing so. Few Christian women these days consider it a requisite of holiness to lock one's self away for 18 years. There are a great many Christian professional women whose mothering skills are enhanced by helpful husbands, older children, and gracious female relatives--all of which Palin has, in abundance. Besides, this is a discussion that should have been settled while she was a mere governor. She's going to be working somewhere, it seems--why not the vice-presidency (which, to be fair, actually isn't as hard as being a governor.)
No one asked Jack Kennedy what he planned to do about his children. No one is asking Barack Obama--whose wife works--how he is going to handle fatherhood and the presidency. And, even more hypocritically, when was the last time someone read Barbra Boxer or Nancy Pelosi or any other woman in elected office the riot act for not being at home "where she belongs?"
The new concern of Democrats with the vice-presidency is comical. After all, wasn't this the same office in which Richard Nixon famously was never allowed above the first floor of the White House? What were John Edwards' qualifications to be president? Gerald Ford? For that matter, by their standards, their own presidential candidate isn't qualified to be vice-president!
And that's another fascinating dynamic of this. As a game-changer, McCain has succeeded admirably, because the comparison is not being made between Biden and Palin, but between Palin and Obama. Every time a surrogate is asked about Palin's inexperience, the conversation is instantly redirected to Obama's inexperience, which keeps the focus of the presidential campaign where it belongs--on the utter unpreparedness of the Democrats' choice to actually be president (we are still waiting for anything Obama has ever done that compares to the things both McCain and Palin have done--or even anything that compares to what Biden has done! Matter of fact, Obama can't even say he lived in the White House and failed to reform health care--and she wasn't even considered good enough to consider!)
But it's not the attacks on her experience that are the most egregious. The worst media behavior has been about sliming every part of her personal life they can possibly grab hold of. Really, think about it: Obama wants to kill babies who have just been born (if their mama meant to kill them); his willing media allies are engaged in trying to destroy a five-month old baby with Down Syndrome.
And the hypocrisy of it all is mind-blowing. The same women who have been haranguing women in the home to get out and make something of themselves, to use their talents for the good of the world, to unchain themselves from the house--and the baby as soon as possible. These are the women who demand government-sponsored daycare (and Obama wants to reach down to age zero to take the babies out of the home) so that mommies can get out and work.
Today they want to steal Sarah Palin's shoes and chain her to the stove.
Keep it up, Democrats. This moose-dressing, gun-toting, corruption-cutting, baby-saving, Superwoman will break you. You can't beat someone who won't quit, and you can't cow the newly energized base by throwing mud.
Sarah Barracuda's in the game now. And she's bringing an army with her.
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