September 10, 2008--The Palin Effect
Just as I was about to drift off for the night, with CNN flickering in the background, I saw images of thousands of people lining the streets in some Ohio town. I thought—Good. Obama’s got his mojo back, people are returning to their senses, and all will be right with the world.
I heard Anderson Cooper say that these throngs of voters had been waiting for hours. That’s what I like to hear, I thought, hoping that the turnout suggests this key state might tip in Obama’s direction and that as a result I’d be able to get a good night’s sleep for the first time since last week, since Sarah Palin became a rock star.
But then I heard Cooper say that these mainly women were waiting to catch a glimpse of Governor Palin, not Senator Obama. And sure enough she then came into view and plunged into the adoring crowd.
So much for sleep.
He went on to report that national polls were now showing the race to be a dead heat, the result of a nearly 20-point swing among white women from Obama/Biden to McCain/Palin. Before Palin’s nomination Obama had a 41-53 point lead among them, and now those polling numbers had substantially reversed.
With another OJ Simpson trial beginning in Las Vegas I thought about the first one—how dramatically differently whites and blacks responded to his acquittal. How race in that case trumped everything else. And now, in the presidential campaign, how it is appearing that perhaps gender for so many is everything.
It could even lead to enough women voting for McCain because of the sex of his running mate to put him and her in the White House in spite of the fact that on every issue that one would expect to influence female voters Palin is even more regressive than McCain.
When many women who were angry that Hillary Clinton was not going to be nominated said they might in protest vote for McCain, for most of them it appeared that all one had to do was utter two words to get them to think about the consequences—“Supreme” and “Court.”
But with a women on the Republican ticket the two words we may be hearing now are “who” and “cares.”
This feels to me like such a consequential election—with the world, our economy, and our social fabric in shreds—that I have been trying to do what I can to help the Obama campaign. Here and in other ways I have been doing my thing. Including recently passing along to my personal network blogs and articles about Sarah Palin’s background—things that are emerging from Alaska by those finally doing some vetting.
I saw a photo of her in an American flag bikini toting what looked like an automatic weapon. And just yesterday someone sent me a list of the books she attempted to ban from the Wasilla library. Thinking it would help undermine her candidacy I passed along both of these.
As it turns out neither may have been authentic. The photo was likely Photoshopped and the list included a number of books published after she was no longer mayor. (She did, though, have at least informal discussions with the librarian about removing some books from the shelves but apparently did not pass along a list.)
So, in my overeagerness to help Obama I did the very thing others had done to him to try to bring down his candidacy, things at the time that I had decried—among many other things circulating photos (I think authentic) of him in African garb and claiming (falsely) that he had been present during Reverend Wright’s past 9/11 chickens-coming-home-to-roost sermon.
Thus, I am not feeling good about either myself or the trajectory of the polling numbers. Ironically, the two might very well be intimately connected: as the media, including TV, newspapers, the bloggers, aggressively take on Sarah Palin—fairly and at times like me unfairly—those who feel that she metaphorically reflects and represents them in their frustration and anger are even more drawn to her. “You see,” they appear to be saying, “look how someone like her is so abused and ridiculed by the successful and smug and self-satisfied. Right on, Sarah. Way to go girl. I’m with you. As I said, ‘Who cares about the Supreme Court.’”
I heard Anderson Cooper say that these throngs of voters had been waiting for hours. That’s what I like to hear, I thought, hoping that the turnout suggests this key state might tip in Obama’s direction and that as a result I’d be able to get a good night’s sleep for the first time since last week, since Sarah Palin became a rock star.
But then I heard Cooper say that these mainly women were waiting to catch a glimpse of Governor Palin, not Senator Obama. And sure enough she then came into view and plunged into the adoring crowd.
So much for sleep.
He went on to report that national polls were now showing the race to be a dead heat, the result of a nearly 20-point swing among white women from Obama/Biden to McCain/Palin. Before Palin’s nomination Obama had a 41-53 point lead among them, and now those polling numbers had substantially reversed.
With another OJ Simpson trial beginning in Las Vegas I thought about the first one—how dramatically differently whites and blacks responded to his acquittal. How race in that case trumped everything else. And now, in the presidential campaign, how it is appearing that perhaps gender for so many is everything.
It could even lead to enough women voting for McCain because of the sex of his running mate to put him and her in the White House in spite of the fact that on every issue that one would expect to influence female voters Palin is even more regressive than McCain.
When many women who were angry that Hillary Clinton was not going to be nominated said they might in protest vote for McCain, for most of them it appeared that all one had to do was utter two words to get them to think about the consequences—“Supreme” and “Court.”
But with a women on the Republican ticket the two words we may be hearing now are “who” and “cares.”
This feels to me like such a consequential election—with the world, our economy, and our social fabric in shreds—that I have been trying to do what I can to help the Obama campaign. Here and in other ways I have been doing my thing. Including recently passing along to my personal network blogs and articles about Sarah Palin’s background—things that are emerging from Alaska by those finally doing some vetting.
I saw a photo of her in an American flag bikini toting what looked like an automatic weapon. And just yesterday someone sent me a list of the books she attempted to ban from the Wasilla library. Thinking it would help undermine her candidacy I passed along both of these.
As it turns out neither may have been authentic. The photo was likely Photoshopped and the list included a number of books published after she was no longer mayor. (She did, though, have at least informal discussions with the librarian about removing some books from the shelves but apparently did not pass along a list.)
So, in my overeagerness to help Obama I did the very thing others had done to him to try to bring down his candidacy, things at the time that I had decried—among many other things circulating photos (I think authentic) of him in African garb and claiming (falsely) that he had been present during Reverend Wright’s past 9/11 chickens-coming-home-to-roost sermon.
Thus, I am not feeling good about either myself or the trajectory of the polling numbers. Ironically, the two might very well be intimately connected: as the media, including TV, newspapers, the bloggers, aggressively take on Sarah Palin—fairly and at times like me unfairly—those who feel that she metaphorically reflects and represents them in their frustration and anger are even more drawn to her. “You see,” they appear to be saying, “look how someone like her is so abused and ridiculed by the successful and smug and self-satisfied. Right on, Sarah. Way to go girl. I’m with you. As I said, ‘Who cares about the Supreme Court.’”
posted by Steven Zwerling at
6:05 AM
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