Don't Skirt the Issue, Women: Which Side Are You On?
Listen up, waffling white ladies: Is there anything more narcissistic, more self-referential, than switching from Barack Obama to John McCain because Sarah Palin is a gal?
The latest Washington Post-ABC News Survey says that a bunch of white women voters have swapped sides since the Republicans named a woman as their vice-presidential candidate, although nobody called me and my friends, I can tell you that. Anyone who's ever made seventy-nine cents to a dumber guy's dollar appreciates the frisson, the little chill, that accompanies what seems like progress for women, whether we're talking about Hilary Clinton or Sarah Palin. It's nice, after all these years of bruising our noggins on that glass ceiling, to see somebody break through.
But have we lost brain cells from hitting our heads for so long? Are we so obsessed with settling the score that we have lost our critical faculties? In exchange for the bragging rights that would accompany having a woman a heartbeat away from the White House, white women and everyone else can get ready to surrender, oh, for starters, the environment, evolution, and - pay attention here - little things like Roe V. Wade.
Sarah Palin is not a hero because she's a woman, any more than Barack Obama is a hero because he's black. One report about the latest poll said that Democratic women under fifty have made the greatest shift, which dovetails nicely with the Republican observation that this is an election not about issues but about personality. What did we expect? We raise a generation on celebrity magazines and entertainment news - and they grow up to have their collective heads turned by Miss Congeniality.
Sarah Palin is not an avatar of women's equality, and if you want to prove that to yourself, try this little exercise. Imagine she's a guy. Imagine that everything she says is coming out of a guy's mouth. Oops. Looks like one more male politician who wants to take away your right to choose - your rights to choose, really, since reproductive rights is only one set of rights Ms. Palin hopes to ambush. Level the playing field - eliminate the novelty factor - and she doesn't even make the farm team.
[I know. Right now a McCain supporter is writing in to say that Obama would never have gotten to where he is today if he were a white guy. He or she is entitled to that opinion. I'm entitled to mine.]
Women who didn't like Hilary Clinton used to bemoan the fact that she was the first woman candidate for president who seemed to have a real chance to nab the nomination; if only it had been someone else, someone with better qualifications or a different backstory, they would have been more excited to support her. I feel that way about Sarah Palin. We have to make her gender the last thing on earth we care about, and stick with our principles.
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IT APPEARS THAT FOR THE FIRST TIME IN HISTORY THE USA WILL FAIL TO MAKE THE INTERST PAYMENT ON IT'S NATIONAL DEBT !!!!!!
DUE OCTOBER 1st ----- $ 511,000,00
GOVERNOR PALIN WHAT IS YOUR SOLUTION TO THIS PROBLEM ???
Governor?
YOO HOO GOVERNOR ?? WHERE ARE YOU ? COME OUT COME OUT WHERE EVER YOU ARE!
Yes ladies decide! Can she handel this!
I'll go ahead and say it, I'm a white man in my late 30's and I'm from the south and a registered republican, although I'm an independent now, just haven't bothered getting that "R" off of my card. I'm also a husband and an expectant father for the first time and we're hoping for a girl. As it stands, McCain/Palin have nothing to offer my family. I have seen posts by supposed "ship-jumpers" online, and even one ex-Clinton supporter on TV, who proclaimed that they would be voting for McCain simply because of Palin. I want my wife to get equal pay for equal work. I want my daughter to have the same employment opportunities as the son we're hoping for later on. Most importantly, however, I want both of my children (once we've had them) to be able to step outside and witness the beauty of the United States even better than it was, when I was a boy. The only hope I have for this is that McCain and Palin get sent home on November 4th. I voted for Kerry, and I'll vote for Obama. I sure as hell don't need the next four years to be like the last eight.
So to all of the women here who are standing up to prove the sexists on the other side wrong, thank you. You are all the kind of role models I want my daughter to have.
Actually, I was reading a article earlier, that they are not allowing people who have houses that have foreclosures vote in Michigan. The Republicans are finding every way to get the minorites and young people not to vote. I think that is shameful. I do not know if what they are doing is legal, but the McCain has set up independent groups, to challenge voters who have a forclusre on their house saying they are not eligible to vote. Look at what the campaign has come to.
If preventing people in foreclosure from voting is legal, then someone pulled a fast one in Michigan, because it's not only illegal in every state that I know of, but it's plainly and simply unconstitutional.
Sarah Palin was selected to try to siphon off female voters from Obama. She's being USED. WHAT COULD BE MORE SEXIST THAN THAT?!
I think the polls are bogus and based on the political need to demoralize Obama's female base.
It is also GREAT insult to women for the press to assume we will jump on the Palin bandwagon just because she has a vagina. Do they still think of us as bimbos? Other than her hamlet which she led from home, how can I feel secure knowing that if the old wizened McCain keels over, then we have Palin at the helm of affairs. It makes me want to HURL.
I am a FEMALE LAWYER and it will take loads more for me to consider McCain than his getting a running mate who menstruates monthly like I do.
As for the FAKE MADE UP polls. I want to see these people who are polled. Women between the ages of 18 and 35 almost exclusively use cell phones. They do not have land lines...so who is being polled and galluped over??????
Well, here is a shocker to the world, Obama draws more women than Mcain because we have families and are CONCERNED WITH ISSUES and not how much lipstick she puts on her dogs or pigs.
Also, she is playing in the big leagues now and so does not have the liberty of crying "I am a girl" when she feels attacked. If anyone has been rude, aggressive and vicious...
Sheesh!!!!
They polled more republicans compared to previous polls. That's where the difference is. But this election the registered democrats outnumber the republicans.
McCain thinks we are bimbos. He does not think that woman deserve equal pay for equal work.
Media Hype. There is no such thing as women leaving any party and voting for Republicans. It just shows how desperate the republicans and their Nazi Corporate Media are. I mean the skewed polls are enough to make you laugh if it wasn't so dangerous.
Sarah relates to women across America like my wonderful wife. She works hard for her money and keeps the kids in school on time, healthy, well fed and happy to be there. My wife loves to meet me at the VFW for dancing, drinking and having a good time on Friday nights. On Saturdays, we have friends over, sit by the campfire and toss back brews while the kids (who are growing up together in life and school) play by the pond.
This is America. This is life in the "fly over states". I live in the Fingerlakes region of New York.
The ladies around here think the world of Sarah. We laugh and tell them to shut up.
This is what you outsiders are dealing with, and you can never understand why you lose...
Dear Redneck,
Your screen name says it all.
Fortunately, most of us WOMEN do not determine leadership qualities based on gender or simply based on women who indulge in similar activities as we do.
Yes I HUNT TOO and I am a big supporter of the second amendment, SO WHAT? Does that automatically confer me with the right to lead our great country.
We are mothers too BUT we want a leader who understands what we do, who we are and the aspirations we have for ourselves and our children.
We are looking for LEADERS not political smoke screens used as candidates. AND most of us are enraged by the continuing misrepresentation of our views in these so called POLLS! *hurl*
We are not STUPID. We see what is going on and we DEMAND BETTER:
Falling wages, job losses, soaring gas prices, huge gains by the oil sector and the total lack of financial growth within the middle class! WHAT IS THE FUTURE FOR OUR CHILDREN? IN THIS MESS and you expect that we side with Palin who has only left the country once and ruled over a HAMLET?
Our country is ensconced within a dire quagmire and the call should be for a DRASTIC CHANGE...
Sarah Palin and these carefully orchestrated and distracting GENDER WARS ARE IRRELEVANT!
Women are not robots and the days when we followed what we were ordered to do by our menfolk is long gone. Did you get the memo?????
So--I'm also from the Fingerlakes region of NY--AND (unlike Cornell Redneck) I'm a woman who can speak FOR HERSELF. Let you wife do the same.... If she is simplistic enough to be swayed by the shape of Palin's skin, so be it, but she hardly speaks for the majority of women I know around here, who are appalled by the Palin selection and who are overwhelmingly vvoting ON THE ISSUES--for Obama.
I have to get my wife to respond to this. If you think I'm bitter about Hillary, you should hear from my wife. Or maybe you shouldn't! Would she vote for McCain/Palin just because Palin is a woman and my wife is looking to avenge Hillary? You bet she is! What is that saying? Hell knows no fury...
It is that same kind of thinking your wife has, that could just get the Roe vs. Wade taken away. Three supreme court justices are heading out in the next four years, and if Republicans succeed, the bench will be all Republicans. Tell er to think about that. I know I am a woman too, who agreed with a lot of issues of Hillary, but it is not worth the country going down the tubes, because she was not picked.
In the long run, she will only punish herself. It is sad, but that is life.
I care about my family, friends, neighbors community, my country and this planet. I wouldn't vote for McCain/Palin if a gun was held to my head.
Anyone who would give the Republicans who have driven this nation to ruin and promise to stay on the same destructive path is beyond stupid. Self destructive is a more apt description. We have lost over 600,000 jobs this year. The economy is in the tank and shows no sign of recovering. Life on our planet is at a tipping point. The Oil Companies are our abusive pimps that we keep granting tax subsidies. We are involved in two wars draining our resources and killing our soldiers. Yet McCain-Palin promise more wars,more driling, more death, less jobs and more tax cuts for the rich while not giving the middle-class crap.
Any woman who would vote for that ticket just because Sarah Palin shares the same plumbing isn't just stupid, they are flaming idiots.
If white American women are actually stupid enough to vote for Palin this fall, they will deserve exactly what they get. Unfortunately, they will take the rest of us, who are innocent of this stupidity, as well as our whole nation, down with them. Obviously, any Catholic or Evangelical women should vote their consciences, if stopping abortion is a central priority for them. But any women who would like for their daughters and granddaughters not to have to go back to the dangerous, often deadly, back alleys for their abortions, really should sober up, and realize that it would simply, ironically, destroy everything feminism has fought for to elect Palin, much worse for liberals than Thatcher, because she's not only a radical conservative on war and the economy, but also, as Thatcher was not, an intolerant religious zealot to boot. This country is truly finished if we follow eight years of distraction from our war on terrorists by fighting a stupid and hideously wasteful war for Israel in Iraq, with a wrecked economy as a result of war deficits combined with deficits from tax cuts for the rich, with four or twelve more years of neocon proxy wars for Likud in Iran and God knows where else, with $12 gas, market meltdowns, and worldwide Depression as a result. How dumb can American white women be? Ready to trade prosperity and peace for your children and grandchildren for the election of a warhawk with a vagina? This is nuts.
I don't believe women have switched sides. I believe the women who are coming out of the woodwork now were going to vote for McCain anyway. They just weren't that enthusiastic about it, so were probably hanging up on the pollsters.
All I know is that all the women I know are now all fired up to vote for Obama.
So we'll see.
Sara Palin is John McCain's idea of the republican party submitting to affirmative action. This unqualified, under exerienced, woman is the closest they would come to having a woman on the ticket.
A woman with a strong unquestionable background of executive experience would be totally out of the question on a republican ticket. Even on the campaign trail, they are keeping her at home, I wonder if she is baking brownies for the Big Boys? If she is such a super woman and she CAN juggle it all, why doesn't she put her Big Girl panties on, get out there, and answer some questions. She can field dress a moose but she can't meet the press? Give me a break.
AMEN! Who are these supposed ship-jumpers, anyway? No one I know!
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