Heather MacDonald is one of those conservatives that is unhappy about the Palin selection, but she is beside herself for other reasons as well.
Had the 44-year-old Sarah Palin, whose greatest political accomplishment before being elected Alaska’s governor in 2006 was serving as mayor of Wasilla (population 9,780), been named Stanley, she would have had exactly zero chance of ending up in the Oval Office in the next four years. But from now on, any presidential ticket that consists solely of white males—no matter their qualifications—will likely be dead in the water.
MacDonald’s panic attack seems particularly odd, after JFK, there haven’t been any Catholic presidents. There have been no female nominees on the top or bottom of tickets since Geraldine Ferraro, and despite Jesse Jackson getting a large share of votes in 1984 and 1988 Obama is the first major party nominee who is black. For more than 200 years, 100% of presidents and vice presidents have been white men. Since there’s been no election yet, the effect of having either a woman or a black man on the ticket is still very unknown, so the only basis MacDonald has for making this claim is that the world is obviously a very harsh place for white men.
Washington Republicans have hardly kept themselves free of race- and gender-based decision making: one can think of many cabinet members and judicial nominations made on these grounds. But now they’ve gone all the way and introduced irrelevant chromosome considerations into the presidential race—the most important political choice in the land. And they have lost any standing to criticize Democrats for playing the race and gender cards.
The fact that Republicans usually chose white men for things doesn’t mean that their decisions are free of race- and gender- based decision making, but if you simply believe that white men are more likely to be smarter or more qualified from jump, I could see how you could come to that conclusion. Moreover, Republican politics are fraught with racial and cultural signifiers, which is ironically why Palin is so popular among the Republican base. Conservatives anxious about the role identity politics is playing in their party need look no further back than Nixon’s Southern Strategy and Saint Ronald started his campaign. Remember Clarence Thomas‘ “high tech lynching?” (my understanding of lynchings is that the victims don’t live to become prominent jurists.)
No, Republicans play these cards with zeal, the only difference is, whether you see them as important or not, liberals seem genuinely concerned about such things, while conservatives simply exploit them when convenient, like when there are PUMA votes at stake or someone is accused of sexual harassment during a confirmation hearing.
This thought I also found interesting:
I thought that conservatives scoffed at the idea that American society systematically blocks accomplished women from advancement.
Really? I always thought conservatives simply thought inhibiting women’s advancement was better for society, except of course when women are needed to make the case that women shouldn’t be able to make decisions about their own bodies, or be paid as much as men for the same work. I thought the point was that women entering the workforce “lowers wages” and “degrades the fabric of society” so that it’s not only “natural,” but better for America in the long run if women aren’t allowed to have the same rights and privileges as men. I never got the impression that conservatives actually believed that there were no barriers to advancement for women, just that they’re there for a reason, and that denying their existence was simply a strategy for keeping them intact.
But surely, one of the ways for the McCain campaign to benefit from the selection of Palin will be to play gender cards whenever possible, even while campaigning on a platform to curtail women’s rights. But if MacDonald was concerned about conservatives cynically exploiting identity politics for political advancement, she should have said something a long time ago.
–A. Serwer
