Palin by Comparison

Sarah Palin’s decision to resign as governor of Alaska may have come as a surprise to many people, but the ensuing reactions and comments from the media and the public haven’t been quite so unexpected. Her move wasn’t quite so shocking as to completely silence her detractors, however, and since her announcement, there has been a great deal of commentary about the intelligence and appropriateness of Palin’s decision. Everyone is second-guessing what Palin really wants, and a great deal of media attention has been spent on what is driving her mysterious choice. Has anyone considered that perhaps Palin herself doesn’t know what she really wants? It is a woman’s prerogative, after all, to change her mind. Could it be that we Americans haven’t a clue what we really want, and she is behaving so much like we might ourselves that she’s got us completely stumped?

A prevalent hypothesis is that Palin is planning on a 2012 bid for the presidency. In a column on The Huffington Post, Cenk Uygur writes that if the move is intended to free her for such a run, her strategy is flawed. “It makes her seem flighty and overly ambitious.” Flighty can’t be good - everyone knows that - but wasn’t it ambition that we so admired in Barack Obama? In an article in the LA Times on November 5, 2008, Doyle McManus wrote that Obama won the election in part because of his “ambitious goals,” so we have established that on its own, ambition is a good thing. Exactly how good seems to depend greatly on who possesses that characteristic. “Ambitious” is a word that often was used to describe Hillary Clinton, but rarely in a positive light. The American people just didn’t want her kind of ambitious, the kind where you tell people what you intend to do and then take steps to get it done.

Uygur suspects Palin’s decision is based on a malevolent scheme to cash in on speaking engagements and book deals, and can’t possibly have been based on a desire to spend more time with her family. “She seemed fine with juggling her family and her career when she was on a national ticket,” Uygur notes. Well, that’s good, isn’t it? Family is important to us. Family is the bedrock of American culture, and we want to know that any woman who might be president could manage her kids as well as the country, so full marks to Palin there. Her kids traveled with her, and although we were suspicious of where exactly she got the money to clothe all five of them, we were glad they were at least good-looking. Unfortunately, we weren’t so keen on the fact that her young, unwed daughter was also managing a family. That became unsightly. Obama’s two kids were just, well, more civilized. They didn’t have that wild Alaska feel, and Obama, along with the help of his wife and his mother-in-law, was also managing his kids just fine. Chelsea Clinton, now 29, is all grown up, so we didn’t have an opportunity to judge her mother on that criteria.

If there’s one thing we do know, it’s how a woman should look. Yes, years of Hollywood movies have given us a very good idea of how a female politician should look: Attractive! A woman in the spotlight should represent America with a sense of flair and style. Palin certainly fit the bill there. She had come in third in the Miss Alaska competition in 1984! Hubba hubba! Unfortunately, all too often “beauty queen” is just a euphemism for “bubblehead,” so maybe a female politician shouldn’t be too pretty. Still, she should be shapely enough that we can dress her up in a variety of clothes. Hillary Clinton didn’t fare so well in the fashion department. During her bid for the Democratic nomination, her pantsuits got more attention that her policies. And even though Obama never wore anything but suits, we could overlook that. Michelle wore really cute dresses, ones from J. Crew that we could almost afford, ones that proved to the nation that her arms are really well toned. We notice and appreciate things like that.

Any politician, wisdom would dictate, should be experienced. You don’t want a rookie on the job. Well, okay, just not too experienced. Hillary Clinton was experienced. She’d been in Washington, had been a senator since 2001, and would have been just the ticket, except that we just didn’t want that kind of experienced. We wanted something fresher, just a different kind of experienced. In the end, Clinton was too experienced, Palin wasn’t experienced enough, and so ultimately, we chose neither. Obama, somewhere in the middle, was just right.

We’re the Goldilocks nation, a country that wants the comfortable and the familiar, which throughout the country’s history has always been male politicians at the highest levels, despite the fact that women comprise the majority of this country’s citizens. We need more women to run for elections, but we won’t get that if all we’re willing to accept is “just right.” Until we straighten out exactly what it is we will accept from a female politician, we should anticipate that sometimes they’ll make decisions that confuse us. Perhaps in Palin’s case, her latest move reminds us a little bit too much of our own uncertainty, and the thought kind of scares us. Until the newspapers and television stations come up with an answer that makes sense to us, we’ll scratch our collective noggin and try to make what we can of it.