I agree with pretty much every word of Aholibah’s post. It’s frustrating, but women can actually acknowledge sexist portrayals of and slurs against Palin, from both Reps and Dems, without actually supporting her politics. We can wish for a woman VP or President of the USA while actually putting some though into which woman deserves the title.
I imagine they feel lots of different ways about it. I personally think it’s the family’s business to decide what to do about child-rearing, balancing career and family, and all that stuff. It’s immaterial to me how they raise their children. Plenty of kids are raised by nannies, grandparents, older siblings. None of my business, really. Do I feel that way “AS A WOMAN?” I don’t know. I feel that way as me. I’m expecting my first child sometime in the next month or so. I’d prefer to do as much of the raising of it as I can myself. How that works out in practice will depend on my finances, job demands, etc. Everybody else can judge my eventual choices according to their own ideas, but I reserve the right to consider some of those ideas backward and anti-feminist.
Almost every election thread recently has kicked around the concept of women voting for McCain just because Palin is on the ballot - specifically, Hillary supporters jumping to McCain (the so-called PUMAs). The idea has largely been pooh-poohed.
But a poll in this week’s Newsweek indicates it may be real: 16% of Clinton supporters say they plan to vote for McCain. That’s not a large number; but the fact that it’s > 0% is mind-boggling. In a rational universe, anyone who backed Clinton in the primaries would vote for Obama.
Assuming Clinton’s supporters are about 25% of the voting populace overall, that amounts to a 4% bump for McCain - enough to make a difference in a race as tight as this one.
I think the crux of the issue is that some women believe she should not have accepted the position, others think she is extremely selfish, and still others think she is the greatest thing since pull-ups. I understand it is subjective to most women.
Seems there are more pictures of Bristol holding the baby than anyone. Maybe the rumors are true and Trig is being raised by his mother.
I strongly agree - she has every right to take the job, every right to go for it, however, I also strongly reserve the right to make a values judgement based on someone else’s decisions when I’m being asked to vote. If I had a pregnant 17 year old daughter and a 4 month old son with Down Syndrome, I would be looking to reduce my responsibilities at work, not seek a promotion. My husband would do the same, because raising a special needs child is not a job for one person - its a job that would take a lot of energy from us both. Palin’s choices say to me that we obviously do not share the same values.
I can’t understand why anyone would think McCain was thinking outside the box or taking any risk in making his V.P. choice. He didn’t choose a woman, after all. He chose a die hard member of the Good Old Boys’ Network…a gun toting maniac who’s to the right of Attila the Hun as far as I can see. She’s got anti-women views regarding reproductive rights and she’s not qualified to be governor much less the V.P.
I hate to think that people might vote for her thinking that she’d be an advocate for women. Participating in beauty pageants doesn’t make one qualified for public office. In fact, it doesn’t even make one qualify as a beauty.
Well you can put lipstick on a Pi… ooops, that’s been taken already. 
Right, and you can put a skirt on an ultra-conservative, anti-choice, cheating, lying, nepotism-loving, gun-toting maniac, but that doesn’t make him a woman.
I agree. Palin is not running for Mom–she’s running for vice-president. I don’t care about her family life.
What frustrates me most about Palin is that there are tons of more qualified Republican women out there. They don’t seem to be of the whack-a-loon religious wing of the party, though.
My guess is what you are seeing isn’t Clinton supporters who might vote for McCain because of Palin, but McCain supporters who were considering voting for Clinton. I.E. - people who really want to see a female POTUS, feel that Clinton is qualified to do the job, and were willing to cross the aisle to vote for her.
That thought crossed my mind as well. So in a way these are classic Identity Voters: they want to vote for a woman. Period. Issues are irrelevant.
I was thinking more along the lines of:
50% agreement with Clinton + gender > 75% agreement with McCain.
Or even, Female > Republican.
My feeling is that for many people, voting the party ticket is easier then trying to make individual judgements of all the candidates. So party ticket it is, until something BIG comes along, like wanting to see a female POTUS.
I would love to see some kind of study that for group one, had people pick a candidate based on a platform, and for group two had people pick based on the same platforms plus a political party label. If the platforms avoided the real hot button issues (abortion, gun control, immigration), my gut reaction is, the two groups would show statistically significant differences.
I’m falling back to my wife’s theory on this one: Sarah Palin is shorter than John McCain.
Does it say why? (I’m thinking race may a more important factor than sex.)
But American politics isn’t about thinking voters. Thinking voters want carefully researched positions, elaborate but viable real-world solutions, nuanced and articulate approaches to complex, multi-faceted scenarios. That shit is hard work.
American politics is a brute force, lowest common denominator, me-too chop shop. Calling it sexist, while true, seems to miss the broader picture. Gender, race, region, class, religion, they’re all just quick and easy ways to cut people into swaths and push their buttons. Sure some people don’t dance, but there aren’t enough of them to turn an election.
:smack:
No rationale was provided – just numbers.
Do you have a link to that poll?
In the print edition, the polls were shown graphically as an adjunct to this article (which references poll numbers). In the online edition, I can’t find the graphics…maybe you’ll have better luck.