Nominee Sarah: Palin’ by Comparison

BY CHERI RAE
Since Helen Reddy’s bold anthem, “I am Woman” rang across the land, women have been empowered to go for it in ways previous generations never could. I’ve been privileged to personally witness females making great strides toward gender equality in a series of memorable “firsts.”
As a sports writer, I regularly interviewed and profiled accomplished athletes for Women’s Sports and Fitness Magazine—including basketball players who played when the rules included stationary players who weren’t allowed to run back and forth across the court—and surfers who went from Gidget to greatness as they learned to dance on waves.

During the 1984 Los Angeles Olympic Games, I covered the first-ever women’s Olympic bicycle road race, won by American Connie Carpenter Phinney, and the first women’s Olympic marathon, won by Joan Benoit. And later that summer, I stood for hours on the tarmac at Long Beach Airport, awaiting the arrival of newly named vice-presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro who gamely delivered her inspirational stump speech to the enthusiastic cheers of assembled hundreds—a crowd depleted by late summer heat and the passage of time.
Those historically meaningful moments moved me to tears—as did the recent Democratic Convention speech delivered by Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton. Had she presented that persona throughout the primary season, there’s no doubt she would now be the first female candidate of a major party nominated for President of the United States. Instead she continues to display her grace, leadership skills and political accomplishments.
And now we’re confronted with Sen. Clinton’s er, polar opposite, Sarah Palin.
The former mayor of a city of 6,500 earned a total of 114,697 votes to become the governor of our largest state with one of the smallest populations — at 670,000, smaller than the population of Ventura County. She earned a bachelor’s degree in 1987 from the rural University of Idaho, and obtained her first passport 20 years later, in order to travel to Kuwait and Germany. She considers both the Iraq War and the building of a $30 billion gas pipeline project part of God’s Plan.
The former state champion basketball player worked as a sports reporter for a short time. Today she considers global warming a hoax, opposes the listing of polar bears as an endangered species, proudly wears fur and drapes a grizzly bear skin across her office couch.
Adapting equal parts of the fictional worlds of television’s “Northern Exposure” set in quirky Alaska, and “Commander in Chief” starring Geena Davis, the 72-year-old Presidential nominee has decided that this 44-year-old mother of five, including an infant with special needs, is the best qualified person in all of America to be his running mate, the first female vice-presidential candidate ever nominated by the Republican Party.
Sen. McCain had plenty of prominent Republican woman with real records of accomplishment, gravitas and serious credentials from which to choose: Sen. Olympia Snowe of Maine (a small state with an equally tiny population); Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas (a huge state with a huge population); former E-Bay CEO Meg Whitman (a whiz at the intersection of new technology and the economy); even the dismissed but still outspoken one-time Chairman of the Board at Hewlett-Packard, Carly Fiorina (an Honorary Fellow at London Business School).
Sisterhood is powerful, and certainly not stupid. This nomination is a sucker punch to every woman in America, with its pandering attempt to attract the so-called “women’s vote.” Palin’s nomination trivializes the serious and legitimate candidacy of Sen. Clinton who truly is qualified to run and to serve; the governor should know better than to allow herself to be manipulated in this way. And if she doesn’t know better, American women do.
This cynical action that values campaigning over governing and craven individual ambition over the good of the nation insults the good sense of the entire electorate. In treating women as interchangeable parts, and impulsively choosing a symbol rather than a qualified candidate, McCain has recklessly risked everything and revealed his complete lack of comprehension of the intelligence of the American voting public.
The current events swirling about Palin’s candidacy recall the short-lived 1972 vice-presidential run of the distinguished Sen. Thomas Eagleton; it ended after just two scandal-filled weeks, when he was forced to reveal his hospitalizations for mental illness and electroshock treatments.
My guess is that in the very near future, vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin will cite family issues as the reason she must step out of the spotlight she never should have occupied in the first place. Sen. McCain and his followers will hail her nobility and ferret about for another running mate—one who will agree to step in for the good of the nation. And sadly, that may have been the plan all along—a momentary, energizing distraction of sleazy political maneuvering that treats the American electorate—and women in particular—with such disrespect, carelessly leaving individual lives and entire families disintegrated in its wake. Call it Hurricane Rove, far worse than Gustav and Katrina combined.
The winds of change cannot come soon enough.

Cheri Rae’s column appears every Thursday in the Daily Sound. E-mail Cheri@TheDailySound.com