Palin may hinder electing other women

Like many people, I’ve trying to wrap my head around McCain’s pick of Sarah Palin, Governor of the forty-eighth state (in population) for twenty months. While many theories abound, my best guess is that trying to pick up Hillary supporters with a woman may have been only one of three of his motivations. Perhaps more important is that McCain is running against what he describes as a celebrity. Regardless of your political leanings, you have to admit that Obama blows away McCain in the charisma department. Palin has a magnetic charm, according to her opponents in the Alaska gubernatorial race, that makes voters love her regardless of her positions on the issues. Unlike Mitt Romney, people tend to believe her sincerity. Also significant is that Palin’s Pentecostal and right wing views amp up McCain’s previously tepid appeal to his party’s religious right base. As more details of her public and private life and of McCain's hasty vetting of her are revealed, however, it is clear that McCain was so desperate to shake up the race that he did not conduct the rigorous investigation to which Vice-Presidential candidates normally are subjected.

Even if McCain and Palin lose, and as long as Palin doesn’t make too many mistakes, there is a potential upside to her candidacy. It may encourage party bosses to put forward more women as candidates in the future under the assumption that they will charm voters. But there are a number of downsides, including that it may set back efforts toward getting more women into elective office.

The first is that her candidacy may reinforce the popular belief that there are no women with the intellect, experience and ideological beliefs that make them qualified to be President – with the exception of Hillary Clinton. After Clinton’s run fizzled in May of 2008, The New York Times could not find a political strategist able to name anyone else likely to be the first woman President. McCain touts Palin’s executive experience, which presumes he sought that in a running mate. If wanted a sitting woman governor, he had only one real choice: Palin. The other two Republicans are in Hawaii and Connecticut. Hawaii’s Linda Lingle is a childless, twice-divorced Jew. Connecticut’s Jodi Rell signed the bill making Connecticut the first state (not acting under court order) to allow gay couples to join in civil unions giving them all the rights of married couples. Rell does not have a college degree. That left him with Governor Palin, a former beauty queen with an undergraduate degree in journalism from a mediocre university (University of Idaho), whose prior political experience was as the mayor of a small town. Her first trip outside the U.S. was last year. If she has any foreign policy expertise, she’s keeping it a secret.

The second downside would continue the popular belief that it may still be impossible for a woman to be qualified to be President and at the same time not have high negatives with half of the voters. In other words, if you’re a woman with the intellect, drive and toughness needed to be President, many voters will find you to be unfeminine and scary. Thus, the parties may conclude that the only way a woman can become President is to follow the lead of George Bush and be perceived as being a congenial sort, a person the average voter could talk to casually and not find intellectually overwhelming.

(An aside: In staking its future on the appeal of underachievers, the modern Republican party seems determined to prove that you don’t need brains to be President. Reagan started us down this path – his intellect was unimpressive to many journalists who interviewed him as his party’s nominee. The rampant corruption in his administration (see my previous post) reinforced this perception. Dan Quayle, who was a heartbeat away for four years under Bush the elder, could not spell "potato." W wore the notion that he was a C student and too dumb to be President proudly on his sleeve, as the candidate with whom you’d feel most comfortable having a beer. His administration’s numerous blunders – that now seem an almost forgone consequence of his incompetence – should have forever banished the idea that you can get by not understanding what's going on if voters trust you to pick smart advisers and cabinet secretaries.)

For a candidate to not appear to be too intellectual usually means the candidate can't actually be extremely smart. That's unfortunate, because the goal of electing more women is actually to make policy changes that both advance the needs of women and, as explained in my forthcoming book Matrocracy, create a more productive, cooperative, safer and happier world for us all. We need the best and brightest women to envision and implement these changes. If women (and men) are to free us all from the tyranny of the good ole boys club, we have to insist on extremely competent replacements. Picking women without the best intelligence and perspective increases the chances that the female leaders of tomorrow will be what some feminists refer to as "social males" – women who simply adopt a patriarchal view of the world and perpetuate it in their words and actions. The problem is more acute in cases such as Palin's, where the good ole boys do the picking. In this sense, Palin’s bid is for women as Clarence Thomas’ nomination to the Supreme Court was for African-Americans.

The third downside comes if the Grand Old Party ultimately does not succeed in dumbing down the office in voters’ minds, and through McCain’s premature death in office at the young age of 73 puts a clearly unqualified woman in the White House. If she does not do exceptionally well, this may block the pipeline for women for that office for decades to come. (The 2005-2006 series Commander in Chief may have prophesied the future of McCain’s administration. In the series, a Republican President dies and his female Vice-President, regarded by some as not qualified to serve, takes over. Too bad ABC impeached it after one season. Otherwise, we could have seen more of how TV writers would imagine a Palin Presidency. Art can imitate life: The TV series, 24, involving terrorist attacks thwarted by torture, has been reported to have significantly influenced Bush administration policy (see my previous post). It’s McCain’s favorite show.)

(Update: Somewhat ominously, in her acceptance speech Palin compared herself to Harry Truman. Less than three months after becoming Vice-President, Truman became President when Roosevelt died. He had been a US Senator for ten years before that.)

Even if you don't care very much about electing more women to public office, there are plenty of reasons beyond her lack of foreign policy experience why Palin’s selection is insulting to the intelligence of voters and disrespects the needs of the country. At this point we should be so past the need to question whether a woman candidate for political office is qualified. In particular, we should not have to raise this question about a woman’s candidacy for Vice-President in the twenty-first century. If McCain had wanted a female running mate, he had several experienced Republican senators to chose from. There is no excuse for putting forward a woman whose lack of qualification causes people to say that she only got the job because she's a woman, as people are saying about Palin. NY Times op-ed columnist Gail Collins hopes that in the Vice-Presidential debate Biden will say to Palin (in a reprise of the 1988 debate), "I know Hillary Clinton. Hillary Clinton is a friend of mine, and governor, you’re no Hillary Clinton."

It is insulting to women to think that just putting a woman on the ticket, no matter her positions on the issues or her qualifications, will convince women to vote for a ticket that opposes equal pay legislation and other efforts towards women’s equality. It’s especially insulting when you realize how far behind the Republican party is in putting women in office, compared to the Democratic party. There are considerably fewer than half as many Republican women in Congress and in state legislatures as there are Democratic women.

At a time when the nation faces difficult challenges both environmentally and staying economically competitive with the rest of the world, it is appalling that McCain’s Pentecostal pick believes creationism should be taught in public schools. One of biggest problems with Palin's belief in a literal interpretation of the Bible is that it encourages our children to reject science. It creates a future in which we don’t make scientifically well informed public policy decisions and we won’t have the trained scientists and engineers we need to retain our stature in the world economy. Oh yes, and Palin may create an administration not well informed by science either.

Palin’s choice to bear a child she knew early on would have Down syndrome strikes me as hypocritical. If one is independently wealthy and prepared to accept all of the financial burdens of a child who will likely have significant medical problems and never be self-sufficient, that is a personal choice. Otherwise, the rest of us are sharing in these costs. Our society already is not meeting the emotional, medical, educational and mental health needs of millions of children. Each time a mother chooses to bring a child into the world that early in her pregnancy she knows is certain to have severe disabilities, that means there are fewer resources to go around for the rest of them. I hope someone will have the guts to call Palin on the hypocrisy of her choice in light of her party’s agenda to slash spending for programs to help needy families and her own inevitable reliance on some of those programs for her child. (As an attorney for children in foster care, everyday I see the impact of limited resources on children’s well being.)

Her agenda to outlaw abortion also ignores the fact that tens of millions of families in America without health insurance cannot bear a child with significant abnormalities without facing bankruptcy. It's immoral to force a mother to bear such a child in that situation.

The Alaska Governor’s Juno surprise – her seventeen-year-old’s pregnancy and impending shotgun marriage – illustrates the failure of her party’s abstinence-only message to teens. Although she claims to be "pro-contraception," she apparently failed to convey this message to her daughter. Voters will rightly question her integrity if she fails to repudiate McCain’s opposition to funding for contraception.

Hopefully all of these issues will enter the public debate about the HerMcCain once Gustav blows over.
(Update: they have on the Daily Show)