The announcement last Friday of Sarah Palin's nomination as McCain's VP was shocking. For one, it came out of left field–Palin being relatively young and definitely inexperienced. It was mostly shocking to me for being a really brilliant political move by the McCain campaign at a time when the Republican party is looking like a bunch of sad sacks shouldering some of the biggest international and domestic political failures of the 20th century (and the 21st!). And then comes the Palin nomination: what a way to capitalize on the American public's recent embrace of non-traditional (i.e. non-white men) candidates into presidential politics. Brilliant and tremendously cynical, since one Sarah Palin does not equal one Hillary Clinton, but to the average American voter who is not terribly informed about politics or candidates, this equation of the two women might just work. Although HRC is pro-choice, had an actual substantive policy platform, including extensive health care expertise, and Sarah Palin is anti-choice and has no policy platform, what a lot of people see is two women who are mothers and were tough enough to have careers in politics too. This may seem absurdly reductionist, but we are now at the stage of the presidential campaign where discourse plummets to just that level.
What Palin also does, besides standing as a really interesting and random trump card for the McCain campaign, is exemplify a certain strain of Idealized Republican Womanhood (henceforth known as IRW): the conventionally attractive, family-minded, hard-working, deeply conservative, wealthy woman who dedicates much of her energy working against what have traditionally been the claims of feminism: namely that women have the right to reproductive control over their own bodies. The Republican party has long had an antagonistic relationship to feminism, but there have been many anti-feminist and pseudo-feminist female iconic Republican ideologues: Peggy Noonan, Phyllis Schafly, Condoleezza Rice––smart women with terrifying ideas. These female Republican ideologues are, after all, incredibly complex in the roles they've played in the party , not just as public figureheads but actually as the party's producers of ideas (Condi is just an enigma wrapped in a riddle as far as I'm concerned). These women have not traditionally embodied IRW.
Sarah Palin is decidedly not an ideologue in this vein (her biography serving as the bulk of her credentials), as there is a dearth of ideas in her rhetoric. Yet there is more than a little of Nancy Reagan, Barbara Bush, and Laura Bush (in all their shellacked, non-threatening femininity) in the way that Palin's being promoted. Palin fits very well into the Republican first-lady archetype of ladies who are strong but at the end of the day know their place (behind the main man). Indeed, there's something very wife-ly about her role in the McCain campaign: she gets to be the tough mother for the public, the protector of the family through her vow to work hard to ban sex education and abortion.
