The Palin Effect

Apparently, everyone, including yours truly, has something to say about the “Palin effect.” Regardless of all the criticism heaped upon her, everyone is still talking about her…

The Wall Street Journal has run several pieces, including one which offers an analysis of her effect at the polls. Conclusion:

Mrs. Palin failed to win the election for Mr. McCain, but that’s setting the bar awfully high. Given the headwinds, Mr. McCain perhaps was lucky to do as well as he did — and his showing might well have been worse without Mrs. Palin on the ticket.

In addition, there were all the personal attacks – she opened her hotel room dressed only in a towel/bathrobe; she was cranky with staff one morning; she didn’t know that Africa was a continent, not a country, etc., etc. Initially, I was concerned that the media had only “anonymous” sources from the McCain campaign. (The National Enquirer might have higher standards of reporting.) It seemed clear that the attacks were malicious and mean spirited, the stuff of losers, as Michelle Malkin succinctly described it. Bill McGurn asserted that it would be a real test of Senator McCain’s character to see how he responded, especially on the Tonight Show. Duly noted, the Senator dismissed the rumors and gave the governor a plug during his television visit with Jay Leno.

But, overall, I was thinking that if these rumors truly came from the McCain campaign, they suggest that the campaign would not have been ready to serve well in the White House. Ultimately, neither the rumors nor their sources have been identified or confirmed.

I appreciate the points of view articulated in all the articles above, but I thought some of the more riveting commentary came from Camille Paglia. Paglia, not a social conservative by any means – she voted for Senator Obama, writes well and offers thoughtful analysis on a broad range of topics. (In some ways, her writing is quintessentially feminine in the very best sense.) Two comments are especially well put:

Liberal Democrats are going to wake up from their sadomasochistic, anti-Palin orgy with a very big hangover. The evil genie released during this sorry episode will not so easily go back into its bottle. A shocking level of irrational emotionalism and at times infantile rage was exposed at the heart of current Democratic ideology — contradicting Democratic core principles of compassion, tolerance and independent thought. One would have to look back to the Eisenhower 1950s for parallels to this grotesque lock-step parade of bourgeois provincialism, shallow groupthink and blind prejudice.

But this is the really intriguing/exciting part:

I like Sarah Palin, and I’ve heartily enjoyed her arrival on the national stage. As a career classroom teacher, I can see how smart she is — and quite frankly, I think the people who don’t see it are the stupid ones, wrapped in the fuzzy mummy-gauze of their own worn-out partisan dogma. So she doesn’t speak the King’s English — big whoop! There is a powerful clarity of consciousness in her eyes. She uses language with the jumps, breaks and rippling momentum of a be-bop saxophonist. I stand on what I said (as a staunch pro-choice advocate) in my last two columns — that Palin as a pro-life wife, mother and ambitious professional represents the next big shift in feminism. Pro-life women will save feminism by expanding it, particularly into the more traditional Third World.

To my mind, this last paragraph illustrates quite well the Palin effect. Pro-life women who heretofore have not been welcomed into the political arena are starting to see openings. The very concept of feminism has been challenged more concretely than ever before and I think there are many good things to come.

I wasn’t overly impressed with the Palin interview on Fox. The whole setup didn’t work: discuss serious election related issues while wearing a business suit in the kitchen and preparing moose stew, or hot dogs, or whatever it was. A much more appropriate setting would have been the governor’s office, yes, with Trig’s crib in the background. In some ways, I find it offensive that we expect so much from women who are public figures. When do we ever question a man’s credentials by looking at his family life? I wish we’d do more of that in some cases, but it’s gone to the extreme in the case of Governor Palin.

Still, these are largely unchartered waters. Mistakes will be made along the way, but the end result is far more important.