Why I Miss Sarah Palin

Until yesterday Sarah Palin had been unusually quiet.

The Romney campaign had marginalized her and Fox News had dismissed her as a commentator.

At its Republican National Convention Team Romney put Gov. Chris Christie on the podium in prime time. It did not even invite Sarah Palin to speak.

Christie was no guts and no glory. He bombed. Then, he returned to New Jersey to suck up to Barack Obama. Appetite control is not his strong suit.

Statistical research shows that Mitt Romney lost the election because Palin voters did not show up at the polls. Could it be that they, like their paladin, felt rejected by the party.

Republicans examined the election data and managed to conclude that they needed to sponsor immigration reform. You know, because, as serious presidential contender Jeb Bush says, immigrants are more fertile.

Now, where did anyone get the idea that Republicans are the stupid party?

In effect, the Republican Party has two people who are good communicators. It has two national figures who can find just the right concept to communicate a point of view on an issue.

The first, Gov. Chris Christie has been a washout as a national leader.

Which leaves us with Sarah Palin.

As you know, Palin has a gift. She can go high-concept with the best of them. You recall her remarks about "death panels" and her famous: How’s that hopey-changey stuff working out for you?

Fair enough, President Obama has a gift too. But his does not involve communicating anything of substance. Obama’s speeches hypnotize people so that they ignore his basic emptiness.

After years of carnage, President Obama has allowed himself to get dragged, kicking and screaming into the Syrian Civil War. Bill Clinton said he should do it, so rather than look like he's caving in to public opinion he would rather look like he is bowing to the will of Bill Clinton. It's called leading from behind.

The debate on Obama’s new policy has been appropriately serious.

Most Americans don’t understand why we are getting involved in Syria because most Americans cannot tell the good guys from the bad guys. Or better,they don't think that there are any good guys. Iranian proxies and Hezbollah are fighting against Sunni terrorists and al Qaeda operatives. Don't you want them both to lose?

One would be forgiven for thinking that American self-interest is well served by their mutually assured self-destruction.

The Obama administration has chosen to provide small arms to the rebels. Thinking people find it risible that the “Fast-and-Furious” crowd has not gotten over its yen to arm criminals.

An administration that did not understand the influence that al Qaeda exercised in Benghazi does not seem to understand that arming the rebels means arming al Qaeda.

Andrew Sullivan argued cogently against the new policy:

You can forgive a president once – even though his misguided, counter-productive and destabilizing war in Libya was almost as nuts as this latest foray. But by deciding to arm the Sunni radicals fighting the Shiites in Syria and Lebanon, the president has caved to the usual establishment subjects who still want to run or control the entire world. I don’t buy the small arms qualifier. You know that’s the foot in the door to dragging the United States into the middle of a civil war we do not understand and cannot control. If it has any effect, it will be to draw out the conflict still longer and kill more people. More staggeringly, he is planning to put arms into the hands of forces that are increasingly indistinguishable from hardcore Jihadists and al Qaeda – another brutal betrayal of this country’s interests, and his core campaign promise not to start dumb wars. Yep: he is intending to provide arms to elements close to al Qaeda. This isn’t just unwise; it’s close to insane.

And then, yesterday, at the Freedom and Faith Coalition Conference, Sarah Palin summed it all up in her typically effective high-concept way:

Militarily, where is our commander in chief? We're talking now more new interventions. I say until we know what we're doing, until we have a commander and chief who knows what he's doing, well, let these radical Islamic countries who aren't even respecting basic human rights, where both sides are slaughtering each other as they scream over an arbitrary red line, 'Allah Akbar,' I say until we have someone who knows what they're doing, I say let Allah sort it out.

Right or wrong, no one has said it better.

Like it or not, we do not have a commander in chief who knows what he’s doing. We do not have a foreign policy team that knows what it’s doing either.

Under the Obama foreign policy the Middle East has imploded. The region has become a rolling catastrophe… political chaos, war, terrorism, famine. You name it, the nations of that region have it.

Peter Wehner offers a sobering assessment of the region:

The Syrian civil war is badly destabilizing our most reliable Arab ally, Jordan. Lebanon is increasingly fragile. In Egypt and across North Africa the Muslim Brotherhood has gained power. Since Mr. Obama withdrew American forces in Iraq, sectarian violence has markedly increased there, with the hard-won gains from the Bush administration’s surge being washed away. The war in Afghanistan is going poorly, while relations with the Karzai regime are quite bad, limiting American leverage in that nation (our much-trumped retreat of forces from Afghanistan have of course limited our leverage as well). Turkey is struggling to contain a political crisis that has threatened the nation’s economy and paralyzed the government. There are no prospects for genuine peace between the Israelis and Palestinians. The Libyan people are weary of two years of militia violence that has kept the country in chaos and stalled reform, with the government weak and unstable. And al Qaeda is ascendant in North Africa.

But, Palin did not merely indict the administration for its foreign policy follies. She also made a mockery of the Sunni and Shia Islamist fighters who are killing each other and everyone else because of a dispute that dates back centuries.

Serious thinkers like Bret Stephens have suggested that sitting it out while the Sunni and Shia terrorists fight it out in Syria is bad policy.

But, Palin did not preclude intervention. She did not preclude diplomatic initiatives, either. She said that given the manifest incompetence of the current administration then she would let Allah to sort it out.

Most Americans, I daresay, would agree with her assessment. At the least, they understand her point. Thus, they can agree or disagree with a clearly stated point of view.

And, whereas President Obama always tends to show the greatest respect for Islam, pronouncing the name of the Prophet Mohammed in reverential tones, Palin dares to make a mockery of the religion and of the deeply held beliefs of the terrorists.

If the whole world sees the Syrian warriors as serious people engaged in a serious fight, these warriors are going to revel in the recognition. They will see themselves as noble warriors fighting for a cause that has put them on the front pages of all the world’s newspapers.

If these same terrorists start thinking that the world sees them as a pathetic bunch of retrograde fools, killing each other for nothing while flinging mindless slogans in the air… then perhaps they will lose some of their will to kill.

If they are not covering themselves in honor and glory, perhaps they will be more motivated to find a diplomatic solution.

Sarah Palin's Advice to South Carolina Republicans

After Monday night’s presidential debate, a wave of queasiness washed over establishment Republicans.

Mitt Romney came to Myrtle Beach expecting to be anointed. He had been told, by everyone who mattered, that the nomination was his to claim.

Many Republicans had already decided that the nominating process was over. Confident that they had chosen a winning candidate they were fast making their peace with someone they considered less than perfect.

Their reason may yet prove to be sound: Romney might well have locked it up.

And then there was Myrtle Beach.

For perhaps the first time on the debate stage Romney was the target. He was under attack, and he reacted defensively.

It is not very surprising. As I have been trying to point out, when you are being assaulted, physically or verbally, your first impulse is to be defensive. We saw Rick Perry thrown off his game by attacks during earlier debates. And we saw Newt Gingrich make a number of missteps after suffering a barrage of criticism and attack ads.

One imagines that Romney did not expect to come under attack. He reacted tentatively, almost becoming tongue-tied. And he boxed himself into an untenable position about releasing his tax returns.

He told Republican voters that they would not be able to see his tax returns until after they had chosen him their nominee.

Why wasn’t he better prepared? I assume that he was suffering from overconfidence. He was prepared for a coronation; he ran into a mugging.

He will surely improve his performance in the next debate.

It is also true that Newt Gingrich performed exceptionally well. He was, the saying goes, on his game.

After the debate we began hearing hints of buyer’s remorse from Romney supporters, but we have also been hearing seller’s remorse by those who had previously dismissed Gingrich.

Now, a wild card just entered the fray. Last night Sarah Palin said that if she were a South Carolina primary voter, she would vote for Newt.

If conservative Republicans are going to slow down Romney’s momentum, they will need to unify behind a single candidate. Palin has now told them that it should be Newt. We will soon know how much influence she still has.

Note well that Palin offered a carefully formulated position, one that was decidedly nuanced and highly diplomatic.

Those who have impugned the intelligence of Sarah Palin should spend some serious time analyzing her brilliantly crafted statement last night.

She did not throw her support behind Gingrich; she did not even declare him to be the best candidate. She did not say that Romney was a flawed candidate or that she could not support him.  

She stated her belief that it was too soon to end the nomination process. She sees the debates making the candidates better. The crucible of debates, she says, has improved the performance of the candidates. They are becoming better at presenting their arguments and clearer in articulating policy.

The Romney campaign wants to lock down the nomination by the end of January. Now, Sarah Palin is telling her fellow Republicans that they are being too precipitous, that they should step back, take a deep breath, and think things through before they decide to walk down the aisle with Mitt Romney.

The Feminist Ruse

Let’s say you’re a committed feminist setting off on a recruiting drive. What should you tell young women to draw them to your cause?

Given the interests of young women, you would do best to tell them that if they follow the feminist way of life they will end up with a happy marriage and domestic bliss.

But then you need to explain how they can do this by putting career first.

It may seem counterintuitive, or downright absurd, but as a feminist recruiter you want to tell women that once they become perfectly independent and autonomous, equal to men in every way, they will be less needy and less dependent, thus,  more likely to be loved for themselves, less likely to be taken as sexual objects.

Let’s grant this argument a certain seductive force. It had better be seductive because any young woman with a modicum of sense would look to recent American history, identify the greatest of feminist heroines, Hillary Clinton, and conclude that the feminist siren song is nothing  more than a ruse.

If a young woman is tempted to see Bill Clinton as an anomaly Maureen Dowd will set her straight.

In her most recent column Dowd tells us that many men who have married incredibly wonderful, independent, accomplished, feminist women, have, subsequently, in Dowd’s phrase, dated down.

From John Edwards to Arnold Schwarzenegger to Anthony Weiner... we might even add Mark Sanford, except that his paramour was apparently accomplished in her own right.

Here Dowd was faced with two possible explanations.

First: Perhaps, feminism got it wrong. Perhaps, feminists did not really understand men or did not care to understand men. Perhaps. feminists were peddling falsehoods in order to lure women into their cause.

None of these satisfies Maureen Dowd. No, siree.

Dowd digs deep into her mental arsenal to arrive at the perfect explanation, the one that answers all your doubts. Men do as they do because they are “dogs.”

Which is what feminists believed from the beginning. They may not have gotten the men, but they now have irrefutable proof that they were right all along. Do not underestimate the power of feeling you were right.

Now we have a new group of feminist heroines. Let’s call them the Wronged Wives Club. From founding member Hillary Clinton, they include the late Elizabeth Edwards, Jenny Sanford, Silda Spitzer, Maria Shriver, and Huma Abedin.

In all of these cases, as soon as a man is shown to have dated down, the press will be filled with encomia about the extraordinary wonderfulness of his wronged wife.

There is no possible way that a sensate human being could prefer the maid to Maria Shriver. No man who has anything going on between his ears could prefer Lisa Weiss to Huma Abedin, Monica Lewinsky to Hillary Clinton, Rielle Hunter to Elizabeth Edwards.

These men are nothing but dogs.

And yet, the down-market women these men lusted after are women too. Don’t they also belong to the sisterhood?

If they do, then, as James Taranto noted on Friday, feminism has “created a female class war.” Link here.

In his words: “At the same time, by denying the differences between men and women, it [feminism] has turned the battle of the sexes into a female class war, with high-status women on one side and low-status but attractive ones on the other. Maureen Dowd and Lisa Weiss may both be liberals, but they are anything but allies. The sisterhood has made them into enemies.”

FYI: Lisa Weiss is the Las Vegas blackjack dealer with whom Anthony Weiner was conducting one of his virtual sexual relations.

We will not even bother to ask how all of these spectacular women managed to marry dogs. Dowd would probably answer that reality forces women to choose between dogs and permanent singlehood. .

How does it happen that these women, respendant in lives that perfectly embody the feminist ideal, find themselves in the Wronged Wives Club?

Do you honestly think that the fault lies entirely on one side of the barrier that divides the sexes? That would be naive, indeed.

Feminism has insisted that it alone knows how women should best conduct their relationships. In its contemporary incarnation it has given out extraordinarily bad relationship advice. Wouldn’t it be reasonable to think that its relationship policy agenda nudged or pushed each of these husbands to get in touch with his inner dog?

Here are the basic tenets of the feminist relationship policy agenda:

1. Put your feminine mystique in a lockbox.  

If the feminine mystique is a sign of female servitude, a woman should repudiate it, forcefully.

But, what happens to a man when he is radically deprived of feminine charm.

He feels that he is starving and goes out looking for crumbs. Apparently, it is not very difficult to find some.

One day when he was asked why he did not cheat on his wife, Paul Newman responded that he had no reason to go out for hamburger when he could have steak at home.

Now we have a group of men who get neither steak nor hamburger at home, but who must content themselves with going out for buns.

2. Turn your home into a laboratory for social justice.

Feminism has always tried to produce a strictly egalitarian division of household labor.

Think of a man who is working late with his management team on a major project. His wife calls to berate him about forgetting to put his dishes in the sink or not changing his fair share of diapers. She has been keeping count.

The stressed-out executive tries to recover his focus by making an offhand remark about his wife’s call.

A comely female junior assistant in the corner of the room pipes up: If you were mine, I would never let you change a diaper.

He may or may not take up the offer, but surely he has just discovered that a relationship with a woman is not the same as a relationship with a feminist zealot.

His marriage is now in trouble.

3. Reject the stereotypical role of homemaker.

A man might well be married, but his wife is never home. If she is not traveling around the world with her female boss, she is working all the time.

Not only is she never home, but she has never bothered to make a home for him.

I will not belabor you with a discussion of what a home feels and looks like when it reflects a woman’s wish to make a home.

And I will not burden you with a discussion of a woman’s nesting instinct. The feminists would say that it is a patriarchal plot.

As it happens, feminism told women that there was something that was even worse than being a housewife: being a homemaker.

So, a man gets home after a hard day’s work, and he does not feel a woman’s touch or a woman’s presence.

How does that make him feel? Alone and rejected, for sure. Emasculated, perhaps.

If he is looking for a woman’s presence as well as a cure for his feelings of having been unmanned, if his initials are AW he knows where he can display his manhood to women who think he’s really the dude.

So far, so good. But what are we to do with the fact that many of these cheating husbands are proud feminists themselves.

This means that they cannot allow themselves to think that their disquietude about their marriages, their feelings of anomie when they walk through the door at night, might result from the fact that their wives are following the feminist relationship manual.

Failing to identify the problem, unable to admit that they are feeling deprived of a woman’s presence, they act out. And they act out in a way that makes them look bad. How selfless can you get.

They know that they look bad; they must know that they are going to get caught. But they do it in a way that will make them look so bad that it will make their wives look good. Worse yet, they will do it in a way that seems to confirm the feminist judgment that all men are dogs.

All of this was well and good.  But then... along came Sarah Palin.

Sarah Palin does not fit the narrative. She does not confirm the party line. In fact, her presence, her aura, her feminine charms, have taken up a comfortable residence in a woman who is strong, powerful, and accomplished.

Since reality can never be allowed to get in the way of ideology, feminists and their male enablers have had to demonize Palin, to make her a complete bimbo, an utter fool and idiot, to denigrate her professional achievements, the better to show that the men who desired her were lusting down.

Sarah Palin’s life suggests that a woman can be accomplished and attractive, but only if she rejects the policy recommendations of the feminist sisterhood.

Feminists have fought back against Palin with a vengeance. They are not going to let Sarah Palin make them look like fools.

No siree, Mo.

Unfairly Unbalanced

As the barons and baronesses of the American press set out en masse to hunt down Sarah Palin, an email at a time, Gateway Pundit Jim Hoft offers a salient comparison: ”In 2008 The LA Times withheld a video that contained footage of Barack Obama celebrating with a group of Palestinians who were openly hostile towards Israel. Barack Obama reportedly even gave a toast to a former PLO operative, Rashid Khalidi, at this celebration. This was something the LA Times hid from the American public before the election.”


The paper continues to withhold the video. And no one cares. The press is consumed with its own agenda that it cannot see its own motives or control its own passions.

Of course, Sarah Palin makes great copy, but shouldn’t we recognize the obscenity involved in stripping her emails bare? Some major newspapers have even elicited the public’s aid in getting to the bottom of the Sarah Palin mystery, the better to discredit someone who fascinates them beyond reason and measure. I would add that the press will never admit how much it is fascinated by the Palin phenomenon,

To be fair and balanced, this same press has given full and complete coverage to uncovering the truth about Anthony Weiner. Up to and including his communications with a Delaware high school girl.

As the French say: Il ne nous manquait que cela.

Somehow or other the press has not spent too much time pondering the cultural symbolism of a Brooklyn Jew who married a Muslim from Saudi Arabia. This having been the concept Bill Clinton presented when he toasted their marriage.

The press has covered Weiner reluctantly; it has pursued Sarah Palin as though she is the ultimate prey.

Palin is a potential presidential candidate, and her does not fulfill the demands of feminism. And of someone who does not kowtow to the mainstream media.

You would hope that the press would be sufficiently modest to disguise or even to temper its lust for Sarah. Apparently, not.

"Fight Like a Girl"

Say what you will, but Sarah Palin gives great concept.

Speaking yesterday in Madison, Wisconsin Palin laid down the gauntlet to Congressional Republicans. She challenged them to emulate the example of the University of Wisconsin women’s hockey team, national champions that they are, and “fight like a girl.”

With a single concept Palin rebuked and shamed male Republicans, presented herself as a fighter, and challenged the feminist left. She took what is generally used as a term of derision and made it into a sign of pride. If you want to draw women voters to the Republican line, you can’t do much better.

For all the feminist insistence on making women strong,  movement feminists are so viscerally opposed to anything military, or to anything that has to do with guns, that they are  constantly projecting weakness.

While Donald Trump is sucking up political oxygen with his quixotic thrust at the presidency, Sarah Palin did what Trump has not done. She gave voice and gave intellectual coherence to the GOP critique of the Obama administration. She also formulated a strong and coherent Republican message.

Think what you will but Scott Walker did not have the rhetorical or conceptual skills to frame the issue as Palin did.

Sarah Palin is clearly a great speaker. Everyone with any discernment noted it when she gave her 2008 convention speech.

Can she win the presidency? That is more iffy.

Palin had been in something of an eclipse lately, largely because she decided to star in a reality show that highlighted her everyday life with her family.

Given that the media has focused a harsh spotlight on Palin‘s family, the better to make her look unpresidential, it did not help her to focus the spotlight on her family life.

I also suspect that a Palin candidacy would be more likely to elicit an independent run from everyone’s favorite vainglorious billionaire, Donald Trump.

Thus, I still favor Chris Christie. The governor of New Jersey has the same genius for forming concepts, framing a message, clarifying the issues, and communicating with the public.

For all the talk about how stupid Palin is supposed to be, how many national Republican leaders have spoken as clearly and as forcefully about the issues? For now, none.

However, if you want an example of true stupidity, how about shining a little scrutiny on a man who sat in Jeremiah Wright’s church for twenty years and did not understand what Wright was preaching.

Or else, imagine that this same man was listening to Wright, understanding the message, and thinking that it made good sense.

That, my friends, is true stupidity.

Sarah Palin on Middle East Policy

Doubtless because she lives in the wilderness, Sarah Palin missed the memo explaining that the primary obstacle to Middle East peace is … Israeli settlements.

Worse yet, Palin seems not to have taken her moral equivalence pills yesterday.

That is the only possible explanation for her remarks to Greta Van Susteren last night: “Why is it in that the past, too often, the U.S. government has told Israel that they’re the ones, the Jewish community, that they need to back up, they need to back off or there will never be peace.. ..Why aren’t we putting our foot down with the other side and telling the Palestinians, If you’re serious about peace, quit the shellacking and the shelling. Quit the bombing of innocent Israelis.” Link here.

Is she right? Has American foreign policy always put the onus on Israel, telling Israel to make more concessions and offer more compromises, while absolving the Palestinians of all responsibility for its recalcitrance and its love of terrorism?

Have successive American administrations been so worried about being perceived as an honest broker that they have failed to place the burden for failed peace talks on the Palestinian side?

Or have these administrations been so concerned about offending Arab sensibilities (and OPEC) that they have felt obliged not to appear too closely allied with Israel?

And have they gotten so used to thinking of the conflict in terms of moral equivalence that they have come to believe it?

Have our best and brightest foreign policy mavens read the Israeli/Palestinian conflict through a narrative in which Israel is oppressing the Palestinian people? Do they all believe that the Palestinians, once liberated from the yoke of Israeli oppression, will live in peaceful harmony with Israel?

If so, then perhaps it takes an innocent, someone who has not been imbibing the conventional wisdom, to state the obvious: that the primary obstacle to peace is that the Palestinian side does not really want it… unless it is a  stepping stone on the road to eliminating Israel.

How can America fight a worldwide war on Islamic terrorism while failing to take sides with the state that is the primary target of such terror?

How many Palestinians recognize Israel’s right to exist at all? And how many believe that the land called Israel must eternally belong to Allah, because it was once conquered by Muslims. After all, Osama bin Laden believes that Andalusia must be returned to Islam because it was once conquered by Muslim armies.

In passing, let’s not ignore the fact that yesterday Egypt Air redrew its map of the Middle East in order to eliminate Israel. Score one for the Revolution that was bringing liberal democracy to Egypt. Link here.

So, the girl from the North country, the innocent Sarah Palin seems to have contradicted decades worth of American foreign policy wisdom. She affirmed her wholehearted support for the one free market liberal democracy in the Middle East and placed the blame for the conflict with the Palestinians.

Given the Obama administration’s policy of chastising Israel for its settlements, and making them the primary obstacle to peace, Palin was clearly rebuking the administration.

As policy debates go, this one is clear and well-defined.

That, of course, is only part of the story. The rest resides in the comments that appeared on the Politico site.

One can only characterize them as a mix of vituperation and vitriol. The ones that are reasonably nice denounce Palin for being a cynical political opportunist… who is pandering to evangelical Christians.

No one, it’s fair to say, thinks that a full-throated defense of Israel is going to garner her any support within the Jewish community.

Other commenters excoriate the former governor of Alaska for being an ignorant fool.

This means that it’s still open season on Sarah Palin. When criticizing Palin, rules of decorum and civility do not apply.

You need not consider the substance of her arguments. It suffices to say that she is so ignorant that her arguments cannot have any substance.

I continue to be amazed at the blatant misogyny of these attacks. 

To those who fear her and despise her, Sarah Palin is very much like a witch. The minute they see her they run screaming for their stash of garlic. Then they wave it around to ward off her profane presence.

God forbid they would engage in serious debate with a woman. Better to follow the example of Bill Maher and dismiss her with some sexist invective.

For my part I was most impressed by the statement that NOW issued after Maher insulted Palin. While NOW felt pressured to denounce Maher’s language, it made clear that it was not going to get into the business of defending Sarah Palin.

After all, the National Organization for Women, averred that Sarah Palin was not one of them.

Isn’t it about time that we got over the notion that NOW was anything more than a vehicle for leftist ideology? If a woman does not share that ideology, then NOW will never give her any more than lip service.

Sarah Palin in Israel

As opposed to Barack Obama, many liberal Americans, and and nearly all progressive Europeans, Sarah Palin is unabashedly and unashamedly pro-Israel.

For reasons that escape comprehension this has made her no friends among American Jews.

Today, as part of her world tour, she is traveling in Israel.

Her message to the Israelis was clear, concise, and correct. It was the kind of high concept thinking that is the secret to her success.

Speaking to her guides Palin said: “Why are you apologizing all the time?”  Link here.

When Girls Rebel Against Feminism

If you thought that Tiger Mom was bad, wait until you get a gander at Feminist Mom.

That’s right, just as our world is coming to terms with Amy Chua’s book: Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, one Peggy Orenstein has brought forth a new book on feminist mothering: Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture.

Keep in mind that Chua wrote about her experience bringing up girls. She is bringing them up to be accomplished, successful women… not CEOs and not radical feminists.

While Chua has been roundly denounced for being authoritarian, when one of them, at age 13, threw a tantrum over her mothering technique, Chua took responsibility and modified her approach.

You might be seeing her as authoritarian; the truth is closer to trial-and-error.

Did Chua’s daughters go through the kind of extreme princess phase that Orenstein is railing against? They may have; they may not have.

More importantly, Chua did not become obsessed with her girls’ gender identities. She wanted them to be the best version of who they were; and that included being girls.

A gender bending feminist like Orenstein is obsessed with her daughter’s gender identity.While she does talk about academic achievement, when this talk is placed next to her rants about princess behavior, it feels like lip service.

As we will see, therein lies the most important difference between these books.

Pity poor Peggy Orenstein. There she was, bringing up a perfectly neutered three year old, when her daughter went to school one day and came home a princess.

Here is one writer’s summary of this defining moment: Here is the way one writer summarized it: “Orenstein's own daughter didn't start out princess-obsessed. Daisy marched into her first day of preschool in Berkeley, Calif., in her favorite pinstriped overalls and carrying a Thomas the Tank Engine lunchbox. (Gender-neutrality achieved!) But it would be less than a month before the now-7-year-old would scream as her mother tried to wrestle her into pants, begging for a "real princess dress" with matching plastic high heels.” Link here.

What happened to transform her daughter from gender neutered to defiantly feminine? Simple: a boy had told her that girls do not play with trains.

For some parents, the princess phase, like tomboy phases, like a lot of other phases, is part of growing up. They focus on more important matters, like math homework and violin practice.

Even if we accept that the princess phase, the girlie-girl persona, has become as overblown as Orenstein thinks it has, perhaps the reason is that it is trying to find its was in a world where feminism has made itself the enemy of feminine women.

Thus, for a feminist zealot like Orenstein, her daughter's princess phase is an existential crisis. It threatens the very existence of the feminist cult.

Don’t get me wrong. There’s nothing wrong or right with overalls and Thomas the Tank lunchboxes. And there‘s nothing right or wrong with a princess phase.

Problems do not arise until you make it into a feminist issue. Someone ought to ask why this feminist is losing her mind over her daughter’s wish to feel like Cinderella.

Why is it so important that the girl be dressed in overalls, and carry a train-themed lunchbox? Surely, every one of Orenstein’s feminist cult followers will find that to be a perfect example of gender-bending, the hallmark of responsible parenting.

But what are these Feminist Moms saying to their daughters. Are they trying to make these girls-- at age 3-- be more boyish, more of a cross dresser, more butch, or just plain neutered.

As we know, modern feminism originated in Betty Friedan’s critique of “the feminine mystique.”

Like it or not, feminism declared war on femininity, and on everything that signified it. It wanted to teach all girls to repress their femininity, because it believed that a feminine woman was necessarily going to become a household drudge.

In the feminist playbook, career success was visited on women who were more manly or even more gender-neutered.

When today’s gender-bending feminists see femininity making a comeback, in exaggerated and caricatured form, through their daughters’ tastes and preferences, they think that they are seeing the return of the repressed. Or better, they are seeing their daughters, from a very early age, rebel against their efforts to bring them up as gendered neutered.

As it happens, feminists are not very self-aware. As  Orenstein rolls out her indictment of marketers, manufacturers, and the media, she neglects the one element that might really make some sense of this preschool rebelliousness: the anti-feminine side of feminism.

When Amy Chua’s daughter rebels against violin lessons, the world’s intellectuals stand up and cheer for her. When Peggy Orenstein’s daughter rebels against her mother’s feminist zeal, the world stands up with Orenstein and blames Walt Disney.

Once her daughter gets older Orenstein will blame Conde Nast.

This extended exercise in blame shifting means one thing: Feminist Mom has no sense of how she is contributing to her daughter’s rebelliousness.

When Orenstein asks why her daughter, brought up in the perfectly politically correct precinct of Berkeley, CA can still be influenced by the princess culture, she concludes that if the poison has  reached Berkeley it must be very pervasive indeed.

But it might also be the case that Berkeley is the kind of place where gender bending is the law of the land. In Berkeley, I surmise, Feminist Moms are doing their darndest to wring the femininity out of their daughters.

Wouldn’t Berkeley be a logical place for rebellion?

And yet, even in Berkeley, some mothers look askance at Orenstein’s efforts to break her daughter of her love of princesses.

They actually suggest that Feminist Mom is “brainwashing” her daughter because she is depriving her of her ability to choose what she buys, what she wears, and what she plays with.

In a breathtaking failure to accept responsibility, Orenstein replies that it is really Walt Disney who has deprived her daughter of choice.

Orenstein is at considerable pains to say that she wants her daughter to grow up to be a strong woman who marries and has a family. For all I know, she really feels that.

But what if that strong woman who marries and has a family, who is as comfortable in overalls as she is dressed up like a vamp, becomes Sarah Palin?

Considering the venom and vitriol that feminists have been throwing at the prototypical Mama Grizzly, you know that that would be yet another existential crisis. The girl would be disinherited.

Feminist Mom is not at all interested in having her daughter grow up to be what I have called, in reference to Palin, “a woman in full.” She wants her daughter to grow up to be a fully zealous feminist.

As I have been at pains to point out, Sarah Palin possesses a kind of femininity that feminists have been working to eliminate from the culture. And that, in princesshood, has been roaring back.

As the title of her book suggests, Orenstein considers Cinderella to be the enemy. She entitled her book:  “Cinderella Ate My Daughter.”

Ask yourself: how much ideological zeal does it take to make Cinderella into either a cannibal or a child molester?

That’s not the only reason why this is strange.

Just look at the story of Cinderella. It is a story of oppression, of women's inhumanity to a woman.Wasn’t Cinderella a beautiful young woman who was oppressed by her wicked and envious step sisters?

The stepsisters are so jealous of Cinderella’s beauty and her sex appeal that they force her to do all of the household chores. They turn her into a drudge, a maid, a girl that no man would ever want.

Still and all, feminine charms win out in the end, and Cinderella marries the prince.

But if a girl were to be given the choice between being Cinderella and being one of the stepsisters, which would she choose?

Strangely enough, people are railing against Amy Chua for wanting her daughters to do their very best, to achieve great things. And they are applauding Peggy Orenstein for trying to brainwash-- as her friends have said-- her daughter into being an ideological zealot.

Which do you think is better?

Perhaps the next time someone decides to write a history of feminism, she will call it: "The Stepsisters' Revenge."

Is Sarah Palin Being Defensive?

Despite herself, Lizzie Wurtzel confessed a grudging admiration for Sarah Palin. She was drawn to Palin because, to her mind, Palin does not take s#*t from anyone. Which is both true and fair. Link here.

Wurtzel is right to admire a woman who can stand up for herself and defend her dignity without engaging in histrionic displays, without pretending to be a man, without complaining about the injustice of it all, and without relying on a male presence to back her up.

One should mention that all human beings are constantly being put in positions where they need to stand up for themselves and defend their dignity from insults and indignities.

It is very difficult to do this, to assert oneself, while remaining dignified.

We also recall that Jaclyn Friedman recommended that women who are being shamed by others should respond by turning the tables, by shaming them. Link here.

Shame is a wondrous weapon, but it must be used judiciously. There’s shaming and there’s shaming. If you are going to do it as flagrantly and openly as Nicola Briggs did on that New York subway train, you have best be sure that someone has your back. Link here.

And it is also important to note that responding to a criminal assault is not the same thing as responding to an insult.

One can only wonder whether Friedman would agree that Sarah Palin effectively shamed the mainstream media when she chose an interesting way to respond to yet another of its attacks on her intelligence?

Several days ago on the Glenn Beck program Sarah Palin misspoke. She confused North and South Korea. She did it during an extended conversation about recent events on the Korean peninsula. Her error was only one of the many references Palin had correctly made to the two Koreas. Within seconds she corrected herself.

Of course, the mainstream media pounced on Palin and declared that the incident proved that she was too stupid to be president.

I will mention in passing that calling people stupid, demeaning their intelligence, is also a shaming tactic. It is not quite the same thing as the kind of shaming we are talking about here, because it does not involve defending your dignity. It is a gratuitous slur, not an assertion of dignity.

So, Palin chose to fight back, on her Facebook page, by posting the following parody. She, or one of her media advisers, wrote out a mock-Thanksgiving proclamation that might have been given by President Barack Obama. The statement contains a dozen or so of Obama's more egregious errors, errors that the media has happily ignored.

Here is Palin’s text: “My fellow Americans in all 57 states, the time has changed for come. With our country founded more than 20 centuries ago, we have much to celebrate – from the FBI’s 100 days to the reforms that bring greater inefficiencies to our health care system. We know that countries like Europe are willing to stand with us in our fight to halt the rise of privacy, and Israel is a strong friend of Israel’s. And let’s face it, everybody knows that it makes no sense that you send a kid to the emergency room for a treatable illness like asthma and they end up taking up a hospital bed. It costs, when, if you, they just gave, you gave them treatment early, and they got some treatment, and ah, a breathalyzer, or an inhalator. I mean, not a breathalyzer, ah, I don’t know what the term is in Austrian for that…” Link here.

The original post has links that will take you to Youtube videos of Obama making these verbal gaffes.

In truth, Palin was not primarily mocking Obama. She was shaming the journalists and media commentators who pretend not to notice when Barack Obama misspeaks, but who fly into full attack mode whenever a Republican makes even a minor error.

Palin is responding to an insult. She is shaming the journalists by pointing out, in a charming way, that they lack journalistic integrity.

Palin is being charming, not whiny or complainy, because in most everyday situations, you cannot defend your dignity by looking undignified yourself. A successful defense draws attention to the person you want to diminish and only to that person.

It all seemed pretty clear to me, almost to the point where it was not even very controversial.

Nevertheless, this morning I was reading conservative blogger Jennifer Rubin, currently with the Commentary blog, soon to be with the Washington Post blog. Here‘s how Rubin described Palin‘s mock-presidential proclamation: “More defensiveness from Sarah Palin. Not helpful for a presidential contender. Dead-on for a conservative community organizer.” Link here.

Respectfully, I disagree. To me Palin’s statement is anything but defensive. If you read down her post you will read the rationale for her action: “When we the people are effective in holding America’s free press accountable for responsible and truthful reporting, then we shall all have even more to be thankful for!”

Shouldn’t the press be held accountable for its own bias? Most of us leave the job to media critics, but is it really that bad for a politician to fight back, to defend herself with humor? Is it helpful to call her defensive for doing so? Would it be better if she just shrunk into the corner and took it?

The real issue is not whether this makes Palin a better or worse candidate. It concerns how you should defend your pride self-respect when they are under attack.

I will add that Rubin’s last phrase: “Dead-on for a conservative community organizer” is a bit too snarky even for me. It almost seems like Rubin feels a need to take Palin down a notch herself.

Palinophobia

For more than two years now many American liberal feminists have been suffering from a severe case of Palinophobia.

To an outsider it has been looking as though Sarah Palin had descended from the Alaskan tundra to disrupt their comfortable feminist world and to cast doubt on their most sacred beliefs.

Throughout, I have been trying to follow the cultural side of the Palin phenomenon on this blog. Which hasn’t been the easiest thing, given the pervasive Palinophobia in my neighborhood. For the file of my posts, follow this link.

Sarah Palin arrived on the national political scene in the midst of an election campaign. Thus, many of her detractors felt that they had to unleash the misogynist furies against her in order to help elect their Messiah.

Desperation makes people do strange things.

By now, cooler minds have begun to take over the debate, and some liberal feminists have made a separate peace with Palin. I have been at pains to acknowledge their cogent analyses.

This much said, I was somewhat taken aback yesterday by a Lizzie Wurtzel tweet. (FYI, famed author Elizabeth Wurtzel uses Lizzie as her Twitter moniker.)

Lizzie tweeted this: “Someone had to explain Sarah Palin, because everyone was getting it wrong. So I did--” She did it in the Atlantic. Link here.

I appreciate the author’s need to attract attention, but everyone has not been getting it wrong. In fact, much of what she says has been said before, on this blog and in other places. I confess to being disappointed that Wurtzel does not read this blog.

In Lizzie’s words: “… as a liberal feminist, it drives me absolutely bonkers that Palin is the most visible working mother and female politician in America, that she is the best exemplar of a woman with an equal marriage, that she has put up with less crap from fewer men than those of us who have read The Second Sex and marched in pro-abortion rallies and pretty much been on the right side of all the issues that Palin is wrong about.”

As always, we admire Wurtzel’s prose stylings, but there is no significant difference between what she sees in Sarah Palin and what I, to take a random example, described two years ago when I called Palin:  “A Woman in Full.”

I do accept, however, that Wurtzel is the first to call Palin a riot grrrl. In truth, I do not even know what that is.

Wurtzel also places a special emphasis on Palin’s sex appeal, but that is, dare I say, old news.  Not only did I, among others, point out its power, but I also expounded on the notion that conservative women politicians and commentators seem to be hotter than liberal women politicians and commentators. See my post called: “The Hotness Gap.”

But Wurtzel expresses her ideas in her own way, and, in itself, that is worth the price of admission: “The right wing, for whatever weird reason, has been much more receptive to outrageous and attractive female commentators who are varying degrees of insane or inane, but in any case are given a platform on Fox News and at their conservative confabs.  Look at how great life has been for Megyn Kelly and Laura Ingraham and the assorted lesser lights.  But there are no Democratic blondes, no riot grrrls on the progressive side of politics, no fun and fabulous women in the liberal scene who could pave the way for a Palin.  Yes, there are women who are successful in the Democratic party, but none of them are successful because of their feminine wiles, none of them have played up their sex appeal the way Palin has.”

Wurtzel can claim originality, however, when she declares that this Alaskan scourge of modern feminism is, after all, just a normal woman. Sarah Palin is a powerful cultural influence, Wurtzel says, because she is just being herself.

In Wurtzel’s words: “Into this horror walks Sarah Palin, who is kind of a sexy librarian, kind of a MILF, kind of just crazy, and altogether does what she wants to do. This, actually, is normal behavior.  But we are so used to watching other female politicians compromise in so many ways that there is not enough Vaseline in all of CVS to make the situation comfortable--so Sarah Palin seems completely strange.”

I’m not sure what Wurtzel wants us to do with the jar of Vaseline, so I will leave that to your imagination.

Sarah Palin is what she is. She is not trying to be something she is not. She is not pretending to be one of the guys. She is not toning down her feminine charms. Palin is not trying to twist herself into some unrecognizable shape in order to fit in or in order to conform to someone’s ideology.

Which leaves us all with the lingering question, the one that has animated Lizzie Wurtzel: how could it have happened that liberal feminists did not produce a Sarah Palin? Is there something about feminism that makes it impossible for feminists to be themselves and nothing but themselves, to flaunt their sex appeal, to be women in full?

The first step toward an answer is for women to turn their Palinophobia into Palinophilia… as Elizabeth Wurtzel has done.

Liberals Are Looking for Their Own Sarah Palin

The blogosphere is abuzz today about an op.ed. by Anna Holmes and Rebecca Traister. Entitled "A Sarah Palin of Our Own," the article bemoans the political ascent of Sarah Palin and decides that, since all else has failed, liberals should try to counter Sister Sarah by finding one of their own. Link here.

Think about it. All that energy wasted. All that righteous anger, that vitriol and venom, for naught. After her shaky start on the national political stage, Sarah Palin has emerged semi-triumphant, not so much as a candidate or as a political figure, but as someone who is leading the national debate.

The irony is too delicious to ignore. For all of the attacks on Sarah Palin's supposed lack of intelligence, she has stepped forward, without any real political power, to exercise a form of political leadership.

The worst part, as Holmes and Traister see it, is that Palin is trying to co-opt the label of feminist, thus depriving it of its leftward tilt and making it less meaningful.

I think it fair to mention that other, stronger feminist thinkers have begun to take Sarah Palin seriously... without the snark and snarl that Holmes and Traister exhibit. I am thinking especially of the women of the DoubleX blog. Link here.

As they noticed, it takes a special kind of intelligence to create a brand like Mamma Grizzlies and to translate it into political influence.

Sometimes it take more intelligence to go high concept than it does to engage in the pseudo-theoretical ravings that get you tenure at many of today's universities.

Anyone who is interested can check out the Sarah Palin tag at the left of this page to check out my posts about Palin and the reaction she has elicited. See especially my post on The Hotness Gap.

While Holmes and Traister cannot disguise their contempt for Palin, one cannot help but think that if left thinking women had been spending as much time building themselves up as they have been spending trying to tear Sister Sarah down, that they would not be having this problem.

When Sarah Palin burst on the national political scene liberals attacked her with uncommon rhetorical violence. From their perspective it was not a bad strategy. Demonization and character assassination do work, for a time, at least.

Sarah Palin became a running joke. Among the literati and the illiterati mocking Sarah Palin became a password that gained you entrance into the inner sancta of the New York pseudo-intelligentsia.

Of course, liberals were in full campaign mode at the time. They were going to do whatever it took to get Barack Obama into the White House. He was going to be America's salvation; he was going to bring back a time when deep thinking intellectuals would be running the country. The McCain-Palin ticket had to be beaten, by any means necessary.

Of course, demonization works best when no one knows anything about the person being demonized. The more people got to know Sarah Palin, especially after the campaign, the more they saw someone who did not seem to deserve the abuse that was routinely being heaped on her.

Moreover, if you are assassinating someone for being incompetent, inept, inexperienced, and ignorant, then you had best, once your team takes charge, demonstrate a high level of competence, eptitude, intelligence and experience.

As we all know now, the Obama administration seems only to have distinguished itself for its overall incompetence and its bumbling ineffectiveness. All of those bright minds do not seem to have a clue about how to manage the government. Their great ideas have done nothing to help the economy; in fact, they seem to have made things worse.

And there was more. After a time American women started seeing Sarah Palin as one of them. Her life was more like their lives than was those of most movement feminists.

It was inevitable that they would see the attacks on Sarah Palin as an especially ugly form of misogyny.

During the campaign Palin did not handle this very well. After the campaign she fought back; she showed that she could give as good as she was getting.

Palin did not adopt the typical feminist grievance mode; she did not complain about why these women were treating her with such vulgar derision.

She stepped above the fray and asserted her dignity. She did not turn the other cheek; she did not walk away from the fight and try to make a deal; she fought fire with fire. In the end she commanded respect.

And she did it better than many feminists had.

And then, reality seemed to conspire to make Sarah Palin's critics look like empty-headed ideologues.

You can argue that Sarah Palin did not have enough experience to be a heartbeat from the presidency, but that charge feels emptier when we have a president who brought even less relevant experience to the job. And whose inexperience is on public display daily.

You can claim that Sarah Palin is unqualified, but how resonant will that charge appear after you have elevated two barely qualified women to the Supreme Court?

You can claim, as Holmes and Traister do, that Palin lacks policy muscle, but does Obama give anyone the impression of having a fully developed policy muscle? And haven't they noticed that our current Secretary of State has no real foreign policy muscle (or experience)?

In a previous post I suggested that the reason feminism has not created its own Sarah Palin is that its adepts have been spending too much time complaining about what was wrong with America. If America is so bad, so misogynistic, and so patriarchal,  how could a true believing feminist dedicate herself to becoming what Sarah Palin became, what I called: a woman in full.

How can feminists make Hillary Clinton their champion when she rode her husband's coattails to power? And how can they present as a role model for young women someone who gained influence by absorbing humiliation and defending her cheating husband.

Of course, next to a woman whose husband is the world's most notorious womanizer, a woman who represents the feminist ideal, Sarah Palin did not have very much of a problem capitalizing on her good looks and sex appeal.

Clearly, Palin's sex appeal has been important. Just as clearly, feminist political leaders tend not to emphasize their own. I would guess that among feminists a too clear presentation of sex appeal is a liability, not an asset.

I offer one final reason why Sarah Palin has garnered the kind of influence and attention that feminists have craved: she is real. She is not a persona invented to demonstrate a political or ideological point.

This means that she has a kind of integrity that is absent from the ideologues on the left. Palin makes decisions using her best judgment, about what is best for her, best for her family, best for her state, best for her country.

She may be wrong, but she offers her best assessment of the issue. She does not worship an ideal or a cause. As long as feminists do, they will never be able to find their own Sarah Palin.

After all, Holmes and Traister do not offer an alternative to Palin. Like good feminists they complain about why there is none.

Palin and the Feminists

As you know, I've been following Sarah Palin for quite some time now. From her first appearance on the national stage, as it happens.

If reputations were like stock, Palin's would have undergone a serious crash from the time of the Republican convention to her resignation from the governorship of Alaska.

I think it's fair to say that for that period of time Palin's stock was in a bear market.

Now, her reputation seems to be getting its second wind, or perhaps even entering its own bull market. I began tracking this last week. Link here.

I was most struck to see that some fairly prominent, and certainly intelligent, feminist intellectuals were starting to show Palin some serious respect.

I do not want to suggest that this incipient bull market has extended very far beyond the rather select group of DoubleX bloggers.

But this is the way public opinion starts to change. First, a few bright people change their minds or attitudes. Then, the new opinion becomes respectable and attracts a few more followers. And finally, it reaches a tipping point where a crowd comes together and you have a full fledged bull market in someone's reputation.

So, it seems to me that we might be in the first stages of a new bull market in Sarah Palin. Not for her looks, of her hotness, but for her political intelligence.

Take the recent post by Jessica Grose, someone who is certainly a feminist. Her fascinating article is entitled: "Democratic Women Lack Palin's Compelling Rhetoric." Link here.

Grose is comparing Democratic women unfavorably to Sarah Palin, on the grounds that their rhetoric is deficient, which means that they cannot persuade and move people the way Palin can.

Grose is offering some thoughts on two different political concepts: Barbara Boxer's attempt to use the issue of "bad hair" as a signature and Sarah Palin's appeal to Mama Grizzlies.

She declares that Boxer and other Democratic women lack a coherent narrative. Sarah Palin has one.

In Grose's words: "... what would you rather ally yourself with: An out-of-date 'do or a fierce force of nature?"

The respect is clear. It is not begrudged. It shows the power of high concept, a clear image that encapsulates and communicates an idea.

Bad hair, even bad hair days, does not communicate much of anything beyond physical appearance. Mama grizzly does communicate something clear and positive; it is not about appearance; it is a perfect totem for a political movement that will appeal to women and will empower them.

For those who had believed that Barack Obama was going to be a great president because he had mastered the art of nuance, his administration's ineptitude has caused much soul-searching.

For those who had made a point of declaring Obama to be brilliant and Palin to be stupid, evidence of Sarah Palin's political savvy must come as something of a shock.

Thus, it is only fair to praise to those Democrats and feminists who have had the integrity to step back from their prior attitude toward Sarah Palin. As they did to Palin, we should give credit where credit is due.

Sarah Palin's First Ad

For someone who is commonly derided as a moron Sarah Palin has just launched a political ad that just about everyone agrees is very smart indeed. Link here.

From having been dismissed and written off as a one-hit wonder, Sarah Palin has maintained her image, her brand, and her political influence.

One can sense, among Democratic and liberal women, a new respect for a woman who has developed a strong and loyal following.

It all means that Sarah Palin, who seemed to have relegated herself to premature obsolescence by resigning from the governorship of Alaska, has now arrived in her own person as a presence in American politics and as a potential presidential candidate.

For many people this is a nightmare come true. For other, more rational souls, it has offered an opportunity to reconsider Sarah Palin.

Among those who offer the best and most reasoned analysis of the Palin ad are writers at the DoubleX blog: Dahlia Lithwick, Emily Bazelon, and Emily Yoffe. Link here.

Take Emily Yoffe's analysis of a point that I have been at pains to make on numerous occasions. Link here for my own posts about Palin.

In Yoffe's words: "What's startling is how Palin fully embraces her femaleness-- her beauty, her sexuality, her Mama Grizzly-ness. We're used to female politicians playing up their gender-neutral competence. But there is Palin making a direct appeal to women, confident that the men who love her won't be turned off by this. I also agree, Abby, that her message that Democrats want to try to run your lives and saddle your kids with crushing debt comes through very clearly without having to say it. And Democrats who dismiss her do so at their peril."

Yoffe is quite correct, but why are we surprised that a political candidate or even a political energizer should find success in being who she is, rather than in pretending to be something she is not?

Yoffe understands that the simplicity of Palin's message is correct for a political ad. After all, the nation just elected a president who ran on hope and change... and what could be more vaporous than that.

For now, Sarah Palin is trying to organize a female voting block, not only based on fierce independence, but on a platform of fiscal responsibility.

Clearly, Palin's ad is directed to a woman's sensibility. But it does not address a woman's issue. It does not try to scare women into voting one way or the other. It empowers women as Mama Grizzlies rather than as chronic complainers. It raises a political issue and offers a policy prescription.

You may believe that the country needs fiscal responsibility, or you may believe that it needs more stimulus spending. Either way, Palin's is a respectable policy position.

That is why men will not feel that they have been excluded from the conversation. Nor will they feel that their opinion does not count because they have never had a woman's experiences.

Clearly, the Palin story has not yet played itself out. If Palin's candidates do well in the November elections, she will be in a very strong position to compete for the presidential nomination in 2012.

But if her candidates do not do so well, then some of her luster will be tarnished. If Rand Paul cannot keep the Kentucky senate seat in the Republican column, Sarah Palin will certainly suffer. And if Sharron Angle loses to Harry Reid in Nevada many people will conclude that Sarah Palin cannot turn out the vote.

If untested and inexperienced politicians in Kentucky and Nevada lose their races, many people will think that it is too risky to vote for a relatively inexperienced former politician from Alaska.