Dumbest Sentence of the Day: Salon's Broadsheet [Kevin D. Williamson]
Yes, it's fish in a barrel with a howitzer. On Sarah Palin, Broadsheet writes:
These [PUMA] agitators will not consider that picking Palin, a politician with only a few years of experience, is a pandering and condescending sop toward them, one that suggests that by dint of her gender alone, Palin could stand in for Clinton, who spent years being fire-forged for her place in history.
By dint of her gender alone? Fire-forged for her place in history? Let's take a moment to review the record: Hillary Clinton was an obscure lawyer of modest accomplishment who happened to be married to the most successful politician of her generation. Her rise came in graduated advances that reliably followed her husband's election to higher office. She presided over the biggest policy fiasco of his presidency, significantly diminishing his efficacy and helped to hand over Congress to the opposition in the process. In spite of being abused and publicly humiliated by the man, she rode his coattails until she was able to get herself elected to the Senate to represent a state in which she had never resided, based entirely on the fact that she is the wife of somebody important and popular.
Sarah Palin didn't ride anybody's coattails into the governor's office. Her husband isn't an influential politician — he's a fisherman and semi-pro snowmobile racer. To compare Gov. Palin to Sen. Clinton is to do a disservice to Gov. Palin — a disservice based entirely on her sex, which is the sort of thing you'd think a feminist blog such as Broadsheet would want to avoid.
If anything, it makes more sense to compare Palin to Bill Clinton: the governor of a lightly populated state with a backward and corrupt political culture, arguably short on experience, from humble origins, but youthful and appealing, and, more important, willing to resist entrenched party interests from time to time. That's a more sensible and less sexist comparison.
08/29 04:48 PM
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