Palin’s Candidacy Reignites Feminist Debate
by Cristina Corbin
Tuesday, September 9, 2008
April 23: Alaska Governor Sarah Palin and her husband Todd Palin hold their baby boy, Trig, in Anchorage, Alaska. (AP Photo)
The feminist debate has come full circle. As Sarah Palin barnstorms throughout the country emphasizing her personal story of being Alaska’s governor and the mother of five children, many liberal commentators are asking whether she can balance the rigor of the vice presidency with the demands of parenting.
Palin gave birth on April 18 to a son with Down syndrome and has a teenage daughter who is five months pregnant. The combination of parenting along with her decision to campaign as John McCain’s running mate has spurred a phalanx of questions from surrogates for her political opponents as well as members of the mainstream media.
“Children with Down’s syndrome require an awful lot of attention. The role of vice president, it seems to me, would take up an awful lot of her time, and it raises the issue of how much time will she have to dedicate to her newborn child?” CNN anchor John Roberts asked during a live segment on Aug. 29, the day McCain announced Palin’s candidacy.
Sally Quinn, a columnist with The Washington Post, wrote in a recent online column that Palin’s need to care for her special needs son, Trig, and her daughter, Bristol, not to mention her three other children, would “inevitably be an enormous distraction for a new vice president (or president) in a time of global turmoil.”
“Is she prepared for the all-consuming nature of the job? Her first priority has to be her children. When the phone rings at three in the morning and one of her children is really sick, what choice will she make?” Quinn wrote.
In a Sept. 5 interview on the “Laura Ingraham Show,” Howard Gutman, an original member of Barack Obama’s finance committee, charged the Alaska governor with “not putting family first” by accepting the GOP vice presidential nomination.
“If my daughter had just come home at 17 years old and said, ‘Mom, Dad, I’m pregnant, we have a family problem,’ I wouldn’t say, ‘You know what we’re going to do? We’re going to take this private family problem…I’m going to go on the international stage and broadcast it to the world’,” Gutman said.
“If you take a daughter who’s got this emotional strife and subject her to the most intense scrutiny of the world at this time in her life, I think you’ve put your career above your family,” he added.
But questioning of Palin’s priorities has drawn fierce criticism from both political parties as well as women’s advocacy groups who claim it is sexist to raise the issue or have declared it off limits.
Obama campaign spokesman Bill Burton later rejected Gutman’s remarks in a statement, saying, “Obviously these comments do not reflect our frequently stated, crystal-clear view that families of the candidates should be off limits, and we hope that supporters on both sides will act accordingly.”
And at a campaign event last week in Deerfield Beach, Fla., Democratic vice presidential candidate Joe Biden alluded to the media’s coverage of Palin’s pregnant daughter by saying, “children are off limits.”
Gutman later claimed in an e-mail that his remarks were “not necessarily related to gender” and were taken out of context.
Kim Gandy, president of the National Organization of Women, said that questioning Palin’s priorities is fair “only if we ask it of men.”
“Once children are born, they have two parents who are equally capable of caring for them,” Gandy told FOXNews.com.
“I don’t think that reporters ought to be flogging an issue with regard to women candidates that they would not approach equally with a male candidate,” she said.
Gandy added that the “sexism directed toward Hillary Clinton during the primary campaign with almost no commentary from the mainstream media was an invitation” to the controversial coverage Palin has received in recent weeks.
“If the industry had taken more seriously the complaint about the treatment of Hillary Clinton, then I think it would be far more less likely that it would be happening to Sarah Palin now,” Gandle said.
Still, many in the media — including conservative commentators — say the question is hardly sexist, arguing that is fair-minded to debate the issue.
“I don’t think the media’s coverage is inherently sexist, it’s a legitimate question to ask” said Rich Lowry, editor of the National Review. “She has a young infant who needs his mom.”
Lowry added, however, that “all evidence shows” that the Alaska governor is capable of handling her dual role as mother and vice presidential candidate effectively.
“I look at the way she’s lived and worked and done this and she seems to be doing just fine,” he said, citing press accounts that Palin nurses her five month old son during teleconferences and changes his diaper in between her campaign appearances.
Noting the recent changes in Palin’s family, Lowry speculated that her White House job could be easier than her current gig as Alaska’s chief executive.
“If she wins, I hate to say it, she might end up having less responsibility than she did as governor depending upon how her role” is defined, he said.
Dr. Brian Skotko, a physician at Children’s Hospital Boston who serves on the board of directors at the National Down Syndrome Society, told FOXNews.com that, in many instances, it is no more challenging to raise a child with Down syndrome than any other.
“We know that about 50 percent of babies who are born with Down syndrome have a heart condition within the first few months after they are born,” he said.
“But thanks to the advances in technology, we have been able to correct many of these conditions, and after the initial medical issues have been addressed, raising a child with Down syndrome does not involve much more time than it would take for any child.” |
