I have a confession to make: I have a strange affection for Governor Sarah Pailn. I mean, I find her really compelling and charasmatic. And that’s difficult, because I really hate her politics.
If you want to feel what I’m feeling, just imagine for a moment that Palin was on our side. Imagine that she was pro-choice, pro-environment, and all the rest of it. Now how excited would you be that we had a woman running for the highest political office who could raise 5 kids and govern a state at the same time? Who was some sort of Annie Oakley, moose-wrestling frontierswoman? And who could give a speech like nobody’s business?
I, for one, would be thrilled. Hillary Clinton, as a candidate, was not ever really my cup of tea — for my money, I would have loved to have seen a woman like Ann Richards get elected President. And Palin is a character like that. No, I know her politics suck. I really do. But I also know that quite a bit of the backlash she’s been experiencing seems, to me, to be simply about the fact that she’s just too female to be able to be president. She’s a soccer mom! How could a soccer mom ever be president? (I ask: why not? We’ve had actors as presidents, frat boys as presidents, etc etc) She’s a mother, she’s pretty she wears skirts! All of that put me on her side to start with. But then I saw her speech at the RNC and oh lordy, she did me in.
When I was trying to explain my fascination with Palin to a close friend last night, he said, ‘you can put her together with your obsessions with Madonna and Courtney Love; none of these make any sense.’ But then, today I found out that Camille Paglia wrote an article for Salon about how Palin might very well be the new Madonna , and I thank her so much for helping me to clarify my thoughts (I wrote the Annie Oakley/frontierswoman stuff up top before I’d read Camille’s entire article and it turns out she makes the same exact comparisons to Pailn). I mean, Hillary was always the ideal second-wave vision of feminism: career gal, pantsuits, asexual, needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle, etc. etc. But with Pailn, we have something entirely different: a girly-girl who hunts. An ex-beauty queen who governs. A politican who’s not afraid to flaunt her soccer-mom-ness. To flaunt her hot husband (male politicians do this all the time). I know she’s not what we’d call a feminist (although she does call herself one), but her character, her persona, in politics, is breaking through some long-held stereotypes, and I can’t help but feel somewhat excited about it.
Hate on, sisters, but I know I can’t be the only one: doesn’t anyone else out there harbor a secret fascination with this pitbull-in-lipstick?
(This has got to be the most amazing Sarah Palin picture, ever)
