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September 10, 2008
Why does Sarah Palin scare Leftists?
During this past week, Hugh Hewitt has taken calls only from first-time women callers and asked of them one question - Why are you excited about Gov. Palin?
Camile Paglia, an Obama supporter, knows
Sarah Palin is like Annie Oakley, a brash ambassador from America's pioneer past. She immediately reminded me of the frontier women of the Western states, which first granted women the right to vote after the Civil War -- long before the federal amendment guaranteeing universal woman suffrage was passed in 1919. Frontier women faced the same harsh challenges and had to tackle the same chores as men did -- which is why men could regard them as equals, unlike the genteel, corseted ladies of the Eastern seaboard, which fought granting women the vote right to the bitter end. [...]This is every caller to Hewitt -- Sarah is one of us. Sarah isn't from the rather incestuous, self-annointed Beautiful People of DC/NYC/LA/Frisco, who all dine together, swap spouses and lovers, dish on each others fashion sense, share vacations and servants, while deciding which of their group will take up the reins next ofPerhaps Palin seemed perfectly normal to me because she resembles so many women I grew up around in the snow belt of upstate New York. For example, there were the robust and hearty farm women of Oxford, a charming village where my father taught high school when I was a child. We first lived in an apartment on the top floor of a farmhouse on a working dairy farm. Our landlady, who was as physically imposing as her husband, was another version of the Italian immigrant women of my grandmother's generation -- agrarian powerhouses who could do anything and whose trumpetlike voices could pierce stone walls.
Here's one episode. My father and his visiting brother, a dapper barber by trade, were standing outside having a smoke when a great noise came from the nearby barn. A calf had escaped. Our landlady yelled, "Stop her!" as the calf came careening at full speed toward my father and uncle, who both instinctively stepped back as the calf galloped through the mud between them. Irate, our landlady trudged past them to the upper pasture, cornered the calf, and carried that massive animal back to the barn in her arms. As she walked by my father and uncle, she exclaimed in amused disgust, "Men!"
Now that's the Sarah Palin brand of can-do, no-excuses, moose-hunting feminism -- a world away from the whining, sniping, wearily ironic mode of the establishment feminism represented by Gloria Steinem, a Hillary Clinton supporter whose shameless Democratic partisanship over the past four decades has severely limited American feminism and not allowed it to become the big tent it can and should be. Sarah Palin, if her reputation survives the punishing next two months, may be breaking down those barriers. Feminism, which should be about equal rights and equal opportunity, should not be a closed club requiring an ideological litmus test for membership.
And Sarah has challenged the powers, of her own local party too, AND WON. She didn't get to be Gov. by appointment or on the coattails of her husband, but because she earned it.
She IS the embodiment of classic feminism. A woman who has pursued her talents, taken on entrenched sexism head on and never compromised on her own beliefs and life as woman/wife/mom.
And she does everything with such gusto!
Sarah Palin is an afront to contemporary feminism, the "closed club" Paglia refers to. And that "club" is a wholely-owned subsidiary of the American Left. The Left cannot let Palin win, either as VP or as a viable future politician on the national stage. That is why the lies and smears are so eagerly invented and passed around.
Even women who don't agree with every one of Palin's beliefs understand both that Palin has never crafted any policy according to her beliefs and that should she be destroyed, no other woman who isn't part of the "In" club will dare run for office.
The Left's thuggery towards Palin, and the Obama campaigns support and encouragement of that thuggery, underscores their basic contempt of women as anything more than tools; window-dressing for promotion of Left political ideology.
And conservatives are the ones trying to impose "back to the kitchen, woman"? Yeah, right.
Posted by Darleen at September 10, 2008 06:24 AM
Comments
Wow, you've gotten even more hateful. Take a break.
Posted by: Josh at September 10, 2008 07:48 AM
Really, Darleen, how disgusting of you to rub the Left's own hypocrisy and misogyny in their faces. Shame on you.
Posted by: Chris at September 10, 2008 06:05 PM
Sarah Palin scares the left, because they're afraid she'll send them to their rooms w/o supper for misbehaving at the dinner table. Such fears are very, very real because they have heard that real mothers do that sort of thing.
Posted by: David at September 10, 2008 08:39 PM
please, enough with the symbolism already.
Would someone please explain to me how a McCain administration is going to be any different from the past 8 years, and whether that gives you red meat conservatives pause.
Posted by: Brad at September 12, 2008 10:06 AM
Brad
Where has O! ever gone against the Chicago machine? Defied the Dem powers?
What was that ...? Yes....?
Thought so.
Let's see, we can have two lawyers who have never had real jobs in their lives, or two people who have experienced life outside the anemic DC aristocracy.
Posted by: Darleen at September 12, 2008 06:56 PM