Maureen DowdSarah Palin represents a huge historic leap forward for women.
When Geraldine Ferraro and Hillary Clinton ran, their fates were inextricably linked with their gender. If they failed, many women felt, there was an X through the whole X chromosome. A blot on the female copybook.
If not this woman now, Hillary’s supporters would ardently ask me, what woman ever?
But Sarah Palin can come across as utterly unready to lead the world — or even find the world on a map — and that doesn’t reflect poorly on the rest of us.
It only means that she doesn’t have enough mind grapes or thoughtsicles, as Tracy Morgan refers to brain droppings on “30 Rock,” to be president soon.
(It’s W., Cheney and Edward Liddy, the C.E.O. of A.I.G. — who can’t seem to stop the conga line of bailout beneficiaries from going on luxury retreats, even though taxpayers have to keep ponying up — who may have clinched the case that overprivileged white men are biologically or cognitively unsuited to hold higher office.)
Palin told Greta Van Susteren Monday on Fox News that her faith will guide her on a 2012 run. “I’m like, O.K., God, if there is an open door for me somewhere — this is what I always pray — don’t let me miss the open door,” she said. “Show me where the open door is, even if it’s cracked open a little bit, maybe I’ll plow right on through that and maybe prematurely plow through it.”
The Alaska governor, who now thinks she is even bigger than her vast state, has certainly not missed an opportunity to throw open the door to the national press this week, letting them hang in her Wasilla kitchen as she makes moose chili and cake and baby formula and hefty servings of spin.
After her brutal transformation by the McCain campaign into a shopaholic, whack-job diva — “Wasilla hillbillies looting Neiman Marcus from coast to coast,” as one angry McCain aide characterized it to Newsweek — Palin is now trying to unmake that makeover and morph from uptown cloistered girl back to down-home accessible girl.
Just hanging in the kitchen with her family and a bunch of camera crews, washing lettuce and washing John McCain and his tattling, gossiping sewing circle of aides right out of her fluffed-up hair. The same McCain aides who blasted the press as sexist for wondering if Palin was hopelessly over her head swiveled around and blasted Palin to the press as hopelessly over her head. The snippy McCain snipers once loved Palin’s sassy ability to burn Barack Obama and Joe Biden with snide little remarks.
So let’s see how they like the burn turned on them? She said that the anonymous aides scapegoating her were “cowardly” “mean-spirited,” “immature,” “unprofessional” and “jerks.”
She’s right. And where was the usually gallant John McCain during all this? Usually Republicans protect their own. There was plenty W. didn’t know during his coaching sessions when he was running for president, but it never leaked out from staffers.
And yet, Palin still seems disturbingly unconcerned about how much she does not know.
Calling Tina Fey. Here’s Palin defending herself on the contention that she got confused about Africa:
“My concern has been the atrocities there in Darfur and the relevance to me with that issue as we spoke about Africa and some of the countries there that were kind of the people succumbing to the dictators and the corruption of some collapsed governments on the continent, the relevance was Alaska’s investment in Darfur with some of our permanent fund dollars.”
And, she concluded, “never, ever did I talk about, well, gee, is it a country or a continent, I just don’t know about this issue.”
Palin’s father, Chuck Heath, told The Associated Press over the weekend that his daughter was “frantically” trying to sort out the clothes she got as Eliza Knowlittle so she could send them back.
“You know,” Heath said, “the kids lose underwear, and everything has to be accounted for.”
As Michael Shear reported in The Washington Post, on top of the $150,000 first cited in F.E.C. filings, Palin spent “tens of thousands of dollars” on more clothes, makeup and jewelry for herself and her family, including $40,000 in luxury goods for the First Dude. The campaign was charged for silk boxers, spray tanners and 13 suitcases to carry the designer duds, Shear reported, adding that one source said, “She was still receiving shipments of custom-designed underpinnings up to her ‘Saturday Night Live’ performance” in October. Silk boxers and custom-designed underpinnings? Sounds like Sarah and Todd were treating the vice presidential run as a second honeymoon.
Palin should follow her own reformer precedent and put the borrowed underpinnings on eBay. The windfall would undergird her new presidential bid.
Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company
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