Gloria Steinen on Sarah Palin

Sarah Palin: Wrong Woman, Wrong Message

By Gloria Steinem
September 4, 2008

Here's the good news: Women have become so politically powerful that
even
the anti-feminist right wing -- the folks with a headlock on the
Republican
Party -- are trying to appease the gender gap with a first-ever female
vice
president. We owe this to women -- and to many men too -- who have
picketed,
gone on hunger strikes or confronted violence at the polls so women can
vote. We owe it to Shirley Chisholm, who first took the
"white-male-only"
sign off the White House, and to Hillary Rodham Clinton, who hung in
there
through ridicule and misogyny to win 18 million votes.

But here is even better news: It won't work. This isn't the first time
a
boss has picked an unqualified woman just because she agrees with him
and
opposes everything most other women want and need. Feminism has never
been
about getting a job for one woman. It's about making life more fair for
women everywhere. It's not about a piece of the existing pie; there are
too
many of us for that. It's about baking a new pie.

Selecting Sarah Palin, who was touted all summer by Rush Limbaugh, is
no way
to attract most women, including die-hard Clinton supporters. Palin
shares
nothing but a chromosome with Clinton. Her down-home, divisive and
deceptive
speech did nothing to cosmeticize a Republican convention that has more
than
twice as many male delegates as female, a presidential candidate who is
owned and operated by the right wing and a platform that opposes pretty
much
everything Clinton's candidacy stood for -- and that Barack Obama's
still
does. To vote in protest for McCain/Palin would be like saying,
"Somebody
stole my shoes, so I'll amputate my legs."

This is not to beat up on Palin. I defend her right to be wrong, even
on
issues that matter most to me. I regret that people say she can't do
the job
because she has children in need of care, especially if they wouldn't
say
the same about a father. I get no pleasure from imagining her in the
spotlight on national and foreign policy issues about which she has
zero
background, with one month to learn to compete with Sen. Joe Biden's 37
years' experience.

Palin has been honest about what she doesn't know. When asked last
month
about the vice presidency, she said, "I still can't answer that
question
until someone answers for me: What is it exactly that the VP does every
day?" When asked about Iraq, she said, "I haven't really focused much
on the
war in Iraq."

She was elected governor largely because the incumbent was unpopular,
and
she's won over Alaskans mostly by using unprecedented oil wealth to
give a
$1,200 rebate to every resident. Now she is being praised by McCain's
campaign as a tax cutter, despite the fact that Alaska has no state
income
or sales tax. Perhaps McCain has opposed affirmative action for so long
that
he doesn't know it's about inviting more people to meet standards, not
lowering them. Or perhaps McCain is following the Bush administration
habit,
as in the Justice Department, of putting a job candidate's views on
"God,
guns and gays" ahead of competence. The difference is that McCain is
filling
a job one 72-year-old heartbeat away from the presidency.

So let's be clear: The culprit is John McCain. He may have chosen Palin
out
of change-envy, or a belief that women can't tell the difference
between
form and content, but the main motive was to please right-wing
ideologues;
the same ones who nixed anyone who is now or ever has been a supporter
of
reproductive freedom. If that were not the case, McCain could have
chosen a
woman who knows what a vice president does and who has thought about
Iraq;
someone like Texas Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison or Sen. Olympia Snowe of
Maine.
McCain could have taken a baby step away from right-wing patriarchs who
determine his actions, right down to opposing the Violence Against
Women
Act.

Palin's value to those patriarchs is clear: She opposes just about
every
issue that women support by a majority or plurality. She believes that
creationism should be taught in public schools but disbelieves global
warming; she opposes gun control but supports government control of
women's
wombs; she opposes stem cell research but approves "abstinence-only"
programs, which increase unwanted births, sexually transmitted diseases
and
abortions; she tried to use taxpayers' millions for a state program to
shoot
wolves from the air but didn't spend enough money to fix a state school
system with the lowest high-school graduation rate in the nation; she
runs
with a candidate who opposes the Fair Pay Act but supports $500 million
in
subsidies for a natural gas pipeline across Alaska; she supports
drilling in
the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve, though even McCain has opted for
the
lesser evil of offshore drilling. She is Phyllis Schlafly, only
younger.

I don't doubt her sincerity. As a lifetime member of the National Rifle
Assn., she doesn't just support killing animals from helicopters, she
does
it herself. She doesn't just talk about increasing the use of fossil
fuels
but puts a coal-burning power plant in her own small town. She doesn't
just
echo McCain's pledge to criminalize abortion by overturning Roe vs.
Wade,
she says that if one of her daughters were impregnated by rape or
incest,
she should bear the child. She not only opposes reproductive freedom as
a
human right but implies that it dictates abortion, without saying that
it
also protects the right to have a child.

So far, the major new McCain supporter that Palin has attracted is
James
Dobson of Focus on the Family. Of course, for Dobson, "women are merely
waiting for their husbands to assume leadership," so he may be voting
for
Palin's husband.

Being a hope-a-holic, however, I can see two long-term bipartisan gains
from
this contest.

Republicans may learn they can't appeal to right-wing patriarchs and
most
women at the same time. A loss in November could cause the centrist
majority
of Republicans to take back their party, which was the first to support
the
Equal Rights Amendment and should be the last to want to invite
government
into the wombs of women.

And American women, who suffer more because of having two full-time
jobs
than from any other single injustice, finally have support on a
national
stage from male leaders who know that women can't be equal outside the
home
until men are equal in it. Barack Obama and Joe Biden are campaigning
on
their belief that men should be, can be and want to be at home for
their
children.

This could be huge.

Gloria Steinem is an author, feminist organizer and co-founder of the
Women's Media Center. She supported Hillary Clinton and is now
supporting
Barack Obama.