In a recent posting by my friend Bite Global Warming ,
he lamented the rise in John McCain’s polling numbers in that last week or so, which is being attributed to former Hillary Clinton supporters who are women switching to the McCain/Palin ticket because it has a woman on it. He said that if women learn the political positions of Sarah Palin on issues that are key to women, they would never vote for her, since she is opposed to their interests and beliefs. I tend to think this is true, but some of the statements he made in his posting were not true. In my respone to the posting, I said:
Visit factcheck.org for more info, but
1. Palin has never been a MEMBER of the Alaska Independence Party, and I can’t find any record of her having gone on the record “supporting” them.
2. She may BELIEVE that women who have abortions are murderers, but she is not on record as having said so explicitly. She is in favor of banning all abortions except to save the life of the mother, and she does favor the death penalty for anyone who murders a child (if she does indeed construe “child” as including fetuses, this implies that she does want to execute women who have abortions for murder, but again the connection is not made explicit).
3. She may be a creationist, but she equivocates about how whether creationism should be mandated to be taught in the public schools.
She DOES want Roe vs. Wade overturned. She came pretty close to stating the her daughter would not be allowed to have an abortion if she wanted to, but she used the language of “choosing life” rather than the language of “coerced childbearing”. Interestingly, she seemed to demand that the boy that got her daughter pregnant become her “fiance” and marry her forthwith, but again, the way she said these things leaves her meaning open to question.
She does support shooting wolves from aircraft.
She fought fiercely to see to it that polar bears were not listed as endangered, but her rationale, to the New York Times at least, was not that polar bear protection gets in the way of oil drilling or that Global Warming is a false myth, but that the Alaska north slope polar bear population has recently increased. (this is a half-truth, since the ocean, and not the land, is where polar bears seem to be dying off, and it would make sense that polar bears would be moving from the ice to the land if the ice is melting.) There is plenty of indirect evidence that she denies global warming is real or is human-caused and that she prioritizes oil-drilling over environmental protection, but she is not on the record as stating these things explicitly.
I think that Palin is probably what would loosely be called a political prevaricator, though in many cases the falsehoods she promotes are not made explicit and can later be denied. Her stated views on most subjects are so far from mine (and Hillary Clinton’s for that matter) that I find it incredible that women who backed Hillary Clinton on the issues could switch allegiance, as the polls seem to imply they have.
I think the best approach to deflating the Palin bubble is to refer to the issues where she has gone on record most distinctly and use them to highlight her questionable judgement and character. For example, Democrats.com is correctly and persuasively stating, “It is now thoroughly documented that Sarah Palin supported the $398 million “Bridge to Nowhere” when she ran for Governor in 2006, even though Congress cancelled the earmark in 2005. She only opposed it in September 2007 after her final efforts to get $329 million more from Congress failed. Yet she kept the partial funding from Congress! So when Palin repeatedly says ‘I told Congress, ‘Thanks, but no thanks’ on that bridge to nowhere,’ she is repeatedly lying.” The controversies over the vindictive and political firings of municipal and state personnel are also well documented, and they show that her character is abysmal.
But maybe facts are not enough. Maybe some ad-hominem (or is it ad-feminem) attacks on her appearance, her lifestyle, and her positions would be politically effective. Something like the stroke of genius that launched The Smirking Chimp
when it was discoverd that George W Bush had an uncanny resemblance to a diffident simian. I noticed the other day that Sarah Palin resembles Robin Williams as Tootsie… perhaps that could be used as a metaphor for “appearances can be deceiving”. It has been used politcally before. There also exist some disgusting photographs of Palin engaged in big-game hunting and in the celebratory culture that surrounds it, which I think would disgust many women and men if they were more widely circulated.
A friend in New Hampshire is also lamenting the fact that the Republicans are crafting images for obnoxious conservative female candidates that mirror the Palin image: For example the Republican challenger to progressive NH congressman Paul Hodes is Jennifer Horn… watch out for the deluge of lies and half-truths in the media about what she stands for!