Palin hasn't had it worse than other candidates...democrat or republican. But she acts like she has...
________________________________
06 July 2009 10:00 AM
Ideas 2009
On Class, Politics, and Bootstraps
by Conor Friedersdorf
Ross Douthat writes his latest column on Sarah Palin.
In this sense, she really is the perfect foil for Barack Obama. Our president represents the meritocratic ideal -- that anyone, from any background, can grow up to attend Columbia and Harvard Law School and become a great American success story. But Sarah Palin represents the democratic ideal -- that anyone can grow up to be a great success story without graduating from Columbia and Harvard.
This ideal has had a tough 10 months. It's been tarnished by Palin herself, obviously. With her missteps, scandals, dreadful interviews and self-pitying monologues, she's botched an essential democratic role -- the ordinary citizen who takes on the elites, the up-by-your-bootstraps role embodied by politicians from Andrew Jackson down to Harry Truman.
But it's also been tarnished by the elites themselves, in the way that the media and political establishments have treated her.
There is something about this narrative that doesn't sit right with me. This "ordinary citizen" who "takes on the elites" happened to be a sitting governor with a net worth over a million dollars, and her family enjoyed a 6-figure plus income even before she became governor. She rose to the national spotlight largely because the editor of an inside the beltway conservative magazine enjoyed meeting her during his luxury cruise ship trip to Alaska. It is true that she isn't an elite in the sense that George W. Bush and John McCain were -- they came from families with political connections -- but it is hard to see how she embodies the up-by-the-bootstraps narrative more than Barack Obama (or Joe Biden, for that matter).
In Ross's telling, what separates the meritocratic ideal from the democratic ideal is whether you can be a success story without having attended Columbia or Harvard. Okay. Well Joe Biden was born into a middle class family to a father who had a long spell of unemployment, and later found work as a used car salesman. He made a success of himself having graduated from the University of Delaware in Newark and the Syracuse University College of Law. Why isn't he the embodiment of the democratic ideal?
But I actually don't want to concede Ross's premise. Given the history of race in America, the election of a mixed race black man to the presidency -- Columbia and Harvard or not -- ought to have as much a claim to fulfilling the democratic ideal as the nomination of a woman who didn't attend an Ivy League college. We've had our Andrew Jacksons and our Jimmy Carters. Despite the frequency of Ivy League presidents, no one doubts that a candidate from a less elite educational pedigree can be elected. Which candidate caused more Americans to reconsider the kind of person who might be elected to the presidency, Barack Obama or Sarah Palin?
Ross goes on:
Here are lessons of the Sarah Palin experience, for any aspiring politician who shares her background and her sex. Your children will go through the tabloid wringer. Your religion will be mocked and misrepresented. Your political record will be distorted, to better parody your family and your faith. (And no, gentle reader, Palin did not insist on abstinence-only sex education, slash funds for special-needs children or inject creationism into public schools.)
Didn't Chelsea Clinton go through the tabloid wringer? Wasn't George W. Bush's religion mocked? Wasn't Dan Quayle's political record distorted to better parody him?
Male commentators will attack you for parading your children. Female commentators will attack you for not staying home with them. You'll be sneered at for how you talk and how many colleges you attended. You'll endure gibes about your "slutty" looks and your "white trash concupiscence," while a prominent female academic declares that your "greatest hypocrisy" is the "pretense" that you're a woman. And eight months after the election, the professionals who pressed you into the service of a gimmicky, dreary, idea-free campaign will still be blaming you for their defeat.
I do think that Sarah Palin was in the unique position of running for high office as the mother of a large family, but Hillary Clinton was certainly attacked for being an ambitious careerist insufficiently focused on family, Mike Huckabee has certainly been sneered at for how he talks, and the "slutty looks" and "white trash" jokes, while unfair and in bad taste, hardly seem any more prevalent than the white trash jokes made about Bill Clinton, or the most strident criticism academics leveled at Dick Cheney.
To sum up, it seems clear to me that Sarah Palin has been criticized unfairly at times, sometimes offensively so -- and equally clear to me that every candidate on a presidential ticket in my lifetime has been mocked and misrepresented. Anyone who doubts that others have faced similarly offensive attacks have too short a memory.
Ross concludes:
All of this had something to do with ordinary partisan politics. But it had everything to do with Palin's gender and her social class.
Sarah Palin is beloved by millions because her rise suggested, however temporarily, that the old American aphorism about how anyone can grow up to be president might actually be true.
But her unhappy sojourn on the national stage has had a different moral: Don't even think about it.
There is obviously resistance to having a female president -- an unfortunate fact that Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin have helped to diminish by garnering support for female candidates on either side of the aisle.
As for social class, however, I am unconvinced by Ross's argument, because Sarah Palin is about as imperfect a test case as one could find. In seeking the second highest office in the land, she garnered uncommonly strident pushback not because she failed to check the Ivy League box, but because she couldn't put a check mark next to any of the boxes that qualifies one for the White House.
Ross mentioned Andrew Jackson as a historical example of the democratic ideal rising to the presidency. Prior to becoming president, Jackson fought in the American revolution, heroically commanded forces at the Battle of New Orleans in the War of 1812, served as military governor of Florida, was a delegate to the Tennessee constitutional convention, served in the House and in the Senate, and sat on the State Supreme Court of Tennessee. He was also a very successful businessman.
Sarah Palin served a partial term as governor of Alaska, demonstrated policy knowledge on exactly one subject, and excited the base. The message to another candidate of similar qualifications should be "don't even think about" running for the vice-presidency. It isn't about social class. It's about everything else.
andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com |
