More of the (Mc)Same!

Gus asked my opinions on the nomination of Sarah Palin as McSame's VP nominee. Gus knows that I am a feminist scholar and spend much of my time sleeping on my ma ape's library of feminist theory. So I wanted to weigh in.

Cynical move, my friend.

Obama gave a spectacular speech and reminded us that we are a new America--we have changed and we will continue to do so, including exploding the myth that the GOP represents mainstream values. McSame needed to steal the media cycle and needed to stoke the faux flames of the supposed divisions in the Democratic party. So? Nominate a woman!

It was a smart move, tactically, because now McSame pwns this news cycle. And it reinforces his mavericklicious! image. He nominates a woman who is the same as Bush/Cheney on social issues. She is opposed to gay marriage and most gay rights (though she says she has gay friends--yipee!). BUT--no one knows anything about her. So he's able to continue to look "independent" by doing the surprising thing of nominating a woman! An outsider! So even though policy-wise she is identical to the Bush/Cheney insanity--the media is too distracted to notice.

So it was smart, tactically, and now Republicans will try to win over Hillary voters by saying that any attack on her is sexist. But women are not a monolithic hive mind and they did not vote for Hillary because she has a uterus and to suggest so is an insult. Women, like every other group, vote on issues. I would be very happy to put Biden's record on women's issues against Sarah Palin's any day. Her nomination was met with cheers by Mike Huckabee, Ralph Reed, and James Dobson. That tells us what we need to know.

But most of all--shame on you, McSame--for making a choice that reinforces the opinion that women and minorities only get positions by virtue of their "novelty." It was a cynical choice that utilizes women for your political ends. Not cool, dude.

Here's a good discussion of it, and here's the best bit:

So in a campaign where the candidate on the top of the ticket has contended that he is immune to criticism on the basis that he was a POW, the we can expect Republicans to argue that the Veep pick should be immune to criticism because she is a woman.

The pick of Palin is dripping with transparent condescension, the notion that the enthusiasm behind Hillary was simply the result of her being a woman, that it had nothing to do with what she actually stood for, and in that sense it's equally sexist. Palin is essentially a hard-right ideologue, and therefore nothing like Hillary as far as substance is concerned. It's not very different from running Alan Keyes against Barack Obama in 2004. The conservative media reaction has already engaged in paternalistic language, with FOX News reporting on television that "McCain broke the glass ceiling," implying in fact, that the pick had nothing to do with Palin or her qualifications, but merely her gender. It's fitting that the party positing affirmative action as a program that picks people exclusively based on race or gender rather than qualification should do something similar given an opportunity for political advancement. While Obama is promising change through policy, not simply through the circumstances of his birth, the McCain campaign thinks his appeal is simply visual and demographic, and therefore something they can exploit.

One of the things that stuck with me from Obama's speech was that the GOP has been successful in making campaigns that should be about big issues about little things--like John Kerry windsurfing, Al Gore's sighs or Swiftboating. Now it is time to talk about those big things because they matter to us much more than how many hours Barack Obama spends at the gym or how many children Sarah Palin has. This is a distraction, an attempt to substitute personality for policy.

No way, no how.