We’re Not Sisters with Her

Palin exposes the feminist Left.

By Kathryn Jean Lopez
National Review Online
http://www.nationalreview.com/
September 01, 2008, 0:30 a.m.

ST. PAUL — Last Tuesday, a coalition of feminist groups, including the White House Project, held a forum on women in politics at the Performing Arts Center in Denver. By week’s end, their world was rocked.

On Friday, John MCain picked Sarah Palin to be his running mate. The White House Project exists to get women elected to office — and ultimately, to the White House.

But in much the same way that the NAACP doesn’t exist to herald Clarence Thomas and Thomas Sowell, feminists really only champion a certain type of woman — a type Sarah Palin doesn’t fit.

In their weekly newsroundup, Women’s eNews declared Satuday morning:

While Palin’s selection was met with cheers among Republican advocacy groups she will not be warmly welcomed to the national stage by women’s rights advocates within the Democratic or independent folds. Ellen Malcolm, president of the pro-choice Democratic political action committee EMILY’s List, quickly issued a statement: “McCain clearly sees the power of women voters in this election but has just as clearly failed to support any of the issues that they care about. His choice for vice president only reinforces that failure.”

In her sarcastic New York Times column Sunday, Gail Collins concluded:

If she’s only on the ticket to try to get disaffected Clinton supporters to cross over, it’s a bad choice. Joe Biden may already be practicing his drop-dead line for the vice-presidential debate: “I know Hillary Clinton. Hillary Clinton is a friend of mine, and governor, you’re no Hillary Clinton.”

She wrote that the insinuation that women would vote for women is “offensive.” Monday morning, a columnist for the Baltimore Sun wrote:

Under the circumstances, the decision to choose this woman over the likes of, say, Texas Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchinson looks less like a stroke of genius than a stroke. It looks crazy. It looks wacky.

You’d be crazy to take that at face value. They wouldn’t have loved the more moderate Kay Bailey Hutchison either, truth be told. Not as conservative as Palin, she’s a Texas Republican who supported George W. Bush and the Iraq war.

As Gloria Steinem put it two decades ago when Geraldine Ferraro was tapped to run as Walter Mondale’s Number Two, “If it was a Phyllis Schafly, no one would be celebrating.”

No liberal feminists, for sure, but Feminists for Life and the pro-life Susan B. Anthony List are fully behind Palin.

In the weeks ahead, Sarah Palin should drop the lines about cracks in the glass ceiling and Hillary Clinton and Geraldine Ferraro. If you’re a conservative who needed to be rallied to a candidate on the Republican ticket who seems to share your worldview, you now have her.

If you’re voting because you’re into good girl role models, you’ll like “Sarah” (as everyone seems to be referring to her), who is very far away from the faux-feminism of the one-free-grope Clinton apologists — something most self-proclaimed feminists can say.

But if you’re a professional feminist, you may just be exposing yourself as more about liberal Democratic politics than any kind of sisterly encouragement for women pols.

And you’re also exposing the so-called “gender gap” once and for all as a myth.

As Kate O’Beirne points out in her book, Women Who Make the World Worse, “In the last seven presidential elections, Republicans have won five times and received more women’s votes than Democrats in three of the races.”

If women flock to McCain-Palin, it may not be because Palin has a uterus but because they vote Republican, know we’re at war, and aren’t into the silly girls’ games the Left likes to play.

— Kathryn Jean Lopez is the editor of National Review Online.