While I, along with many other conservatives, have been watching Sarah Palin since last spring and hoping that John McCain would select her as his running mate, apparently her selection caught many on the left - and even some on the right - by surprise. I’ve been both dismayed and offended by the viciousness of the left’s response. I’ve thought about it a lot, and I’ve read extensively both pro and con about the choice. And I’ve reached my own conclusions.
The Republican ticket of John McCain and Sarah Palin exposes as false many of the closely held stereotypes about the right that so many on the left hold dear - stereotypes that they use to justify their own prejudices. Let’s look at some of them.
(1) “Republicans are a bunch of racists - nothing but rich white men.” This is the lie that is repeated often by people on the left. It is simply not true and never has been. John McCain himself has a racially mixed family. Up until recently many people didn’t even know about the McCain’s daughter, Bridget, because McCain hasn’t used her for political gain. She’s just part of the family. Shortly after the end of the Civil War, African Americans were the backbone of the Republican party. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. registered as a Republican in 1956. The roots of African American political action are in the Republican party.
(2) “Republicans are sexist and want to keep their women at home raising the children.” The inaccuracy of this stereotype is illustrated by Sarah Palin’s life itself and the overwhelming approval rating she had as a city mayor, a state governor and now as the Republican Vice Presidential nominee. Both men and women in the Republican party have exuberantly accepted her and now enthusiastically support her. The opposite reaction has come from the people of the Democratic party - the self-proclaimed party of equal rights and feminism. They’ve criticized her parenting skills, her experience as a state governor has been minimized and even mocked, and people have even made fun of her children’s names. Suddenly, the ability of a woman to have both a career and a family has been called into question - by the left.
(3) “In order to believe in equal rights for women, you must support abortion on demand.” Sarah Palin doesn’t believe in abortion. She learned early on in her fifth pregnancy that her son, Trig, had Down Syndrome. The news was, of course, difficult to hear and difficult to deal with. Because of her own apprehensions of raising a special needs child, not wanting to burden her family with those concerns earlier than necessary, and because alerting the media to her pregnancy would just make it more difficult to manage, she kept it a secret as long as she could. While carrying the child to term was her decision, it wasn’t an easy one to carry out. Being pro-life has nothing to do with equal rights for women. It has to do with a person’s beliefs about when life begins. Sarah Palin is an example of a person who believes equal rights for all Americans - including unborn babies.
In addition to the three key stereotypes described above, the left has attacked Sarah Palin and John McCain based on Palin’s experience and qualifications for the office of vice president. With Obama’s own slim resume of experience and qualifications for national office, those arguments only illuminate the hypocrisy of the left. The left criticizes and minimizes the Republican vice presidential candidate’s qualifications for VP while they support a presidential candidate with even less experience and some extremely questionable long-term relationships. Only the ones blinded by their allegiance to the Democratic ticket are unable to see the fallacy of that argument.
The Republican ticket includes a presidential candidate with a mixed race family and a vice presidential candidate who is a woman and who chose to not abort a special needs baby. No wonder the left is upset. The stereotypes of racism and sexism that they’ve ascribed to the Republican party for so long just don’t fit. They never did, but the Democratic party had been successful is promoting them. It’s maddening for them now. In their anger and frustration at being found out for the hypocrites they are, they respond with lies and innuendo.
The good news for America is that with the left’s exposure as inherently hypocritical, independent thinkers are able to see which ticket is truly about change and what’s best for America.
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September 10th, 2008 at 5:12 pm
To be honest, I think you’re constructing a straw man argument here. The left isn’t upset because she breaks stereotype. Consider these alternatives:
1. She belongs to a an extreme pentecostal group, and her theology impacts her views on policy such that she supports teaching creationism, she refutes global warming, and promotes abstinence-only education (despite that these programs have proven not to work). Allegedly there was also a program at her church to “pray the gay away.”
2. She claims to be a reformer, when in fact she has supported pork barrel and earmarks both as mayor and governor (which is why honest fiscal conservatives don’t trust her, either).
3. If the left is hypocritical about experience, then so is the right: attacks against Obama were framed almost entirely around “experience,” and then Palin comes along who plainly has even less experience. Either McCain’s camp never really believed what they were saying, or they’ve flip-flopped about the importance of experience.
4. The whole package, in short, would seem to indicate someone who would govern Cheney-style while holding the social views of Dobson, all in a person who only two years ago was the mayor of a town of less than 10,000.
It’s true that the left doesn’t like her–but there are legitimate reasons for this.