Sarah Palin
Not Fit To Be Vice President
Palin becoming vice president would do for women what Alberto Gonzales has done for Latinos and what Condoleezza Rice has done for black women — set them back many decades.
When asked about Sarah Palin’s qualifications:
Republican State Senate President Lyda Green from Wasilla:
"She's not prepared to be governor.
How can she be prepared to be vice president or president?"
Republican House Speaker John Harris:
"She's old enough," Harris said. "She's a U.S. citizen."
Gloria Steinem; author, feminist movement leader
“Palin shares nothing but a chromosome with Clinton.”
Palin on Running Wasilla: “It’s Not Rocket Science”
By Laura McGann 9/2/08 7:08 PM
WASILLA, Alaska– I’m here at the Mat-Su Frontiersman’s offices flipping through their print archives. I was curious about what then-Mayor Sarah Palin said at the time about giving her top managers a loyalty test and eventually firing her chief of police.
I’m reading an article from October 1996, in which a reporter named Laura Mitchell Harris asks Palin about her intentions for a shake up. How would she effectively run a city without experienced leaders? “”It’s not rocket science,” Palin said, “It’s $6 million and 53 employees.”
“Sarah Palin shares nothing but a chromosome with Hillary Clinton. She is Phyllis Schlafly, only younger.”
By Gloria Steinem - September 4, 2008
Here’s the good news: Women have become so politically powerful that even the anti-feminist right wing — the folks with a headlock on the Republican Party — are trying to appease the gender gap with a first-ever female vice president. We owe this to women — and to many men too — who have picketed, gone on hunger strikes or confronted violence at the polls so women can vote. We owe it to Shirley Chisholm, who first took the “white-male-only” sign off the White House, and to Hillary Rodham Clinton, who hung in there through ridicule and misogyny to win 18 million votes.
But here is even better news: It won’t work. This isn’t the first time a boss has picked an unqualified woman just because she agrees with him and opposes everything most other women want and need. Feminism has never been about getting a job for one woman. It’s about making life more fair for women everywhere. It’s not about a piece of the existing pie; there are too many of us for that. It’s about baking a new pie.
Selecting Sarah Palin, who was touted all summer by Rush Limbaugh, is no way to attract most women, including die-hard Clinton supporters. Palin shares nothing but a chromosome with Clinton. Her down-home, divisive and deceptive speech did nothing to cosmeticize a Republican convention that has more than twice as many male delegates as female, a presidential candidate who is owned and operated by the right wing and a platform that opposes pretty much everything Clinton’s candidacy stood for — and that Barack Obama’s still does. To vote in protest for McCain/Palin would be like saying, “Somebody stole my shoes, so I’ll amputate my legs.”
This is not to beat up on Palin. I defend her right to be wrong, even on issues that matter most to me. I regret that people say she can’t do the job because she has children in need of care, especially if they wouldn’t say the same about a father. I get no pleasure from imagining her in the spotlight on national and foreign policy issues about which she has zero background, with one month to learn to compete with Sen. Joe Biden’s 37 years’ experience.
Palin has been honest about what she doesn’t know. When asked last month about the vice presidency, she said, “I still can’t answer that question until someone answers for me: What is it exactly that the VP does every day?” When asked about Iraq, she said, “I haven’t really focused much on the war in Iraq.”
She was elected governor largely because the incumbent was unpopular, and she’s won over Alaskans mostly by using unprecedented oil wealth to give a $1,200 rebate to every resident. Now she is being praised by McCain’s campaign as a tax cutter, despite the fact that Alaska has no state income or sales tax. Perhaps McCain has opposed affirmative action for so long that he doesn’t know it’s about inviting more people to meet standards, not lowering them. Or perhaps McCain is following the Bush administration habit, as in the Justice Department, of putting a job candidate’s views on “God, guns and gays” ahead of competence. The difference is that McCain is filling a job one 72-year-old heartbeat away from the presidency.
So let’s be clear: The culprit is John McCain. He may have chosen Palin out of change-envy, or a belief that women can’t tell the difference between form and content, but the main motive was to please right-wing ideologues; the same ones who nixed anyone who is now or ever has been a supporter of reproductive freedom. If that were not the case, McCain could have chosen a woman who knows what a vice president does and who has thought about Iraq; someone like Texas Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison or Sen. Olympia Snowe of Maine. McCain could have taken a baby step away from right-wing patriarchs who determine his actions, right down to opposing the Violence Against Women Act.
Palin’s value to those patriarchs is clear: She opposes just about every issue that women support by a majority or plurality. She believes that creationism should be taught in public schools but disbelieves global warming; she opposes gun control but supports government control of women’s wombs; she opposes stem cell research but approves “abstinence-only” programs, which increase unwanted births, sexually transmitted diseases and abortions; she tried to use taxpayers’ millions for a state program to shoot wolves from the air but didn’t spend enough money to fix a state school system with the lowest high-school graduation rate in the nation; she runs with a candidate who opposes the Fair Pay Act but supports $500 million in subsidies for a natural gas pipeline across Alaska; she supports drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve, though even McCain has opted for the lesser evil of offshore drilling. She is Phyllis Schlafly, only younger.
I don’t doubt her sincerity. As a lifetime member of the National Rifle Assn., she doesn’t just support killing animals from helicopters, she does it herself. She doesn’t just talk about increasing the use of fossil fuels but puts a coal-burning power plant in her own small town. She doesn’t just echo McCain’s pledge to criminalize abortion by overturning Roe vs. Wade, she says that if one of her daughters were impregnated by rape or incest, she should bear the child. She not only opposes reproductive freedom as a human right but implies that it dictates abortion, without saying that it also protects the right to have a child.
So far, the major new McCain supporter that Palin has attracted is James Dobson of Focus on the Family. Of course, for Dobson, “women are merely waiting for their husbands to assume leadership,” so he may be voting for Palin’s husband.
Being a hope-a-holic, however, I can see two long-term bipartisan gains from this contest.
Republicans may learn they can’t appeal to right-wing patriarchs and most women at the same time. A loss in November could cause the centrist majority of Republicans to take back their party, which was the first to support the Equal Rights Amendment and should be the last to want to invite government into the wombs of women.
And American women, who suffer more because of having two full-time jobs than from any other single injustice, finally have support on a national stage from male leaders who know that women can’t be equal outside the home until men are equal in it. Barack Obama and Joe Biden are campaigning on their belief that men should be, can be and want to be at home for their children.
This could be huge.
Gloria Steinem is an author, feminist organizer and co-founder of the Women’s Media Center. She supported Hillary Clinton and is now supporting Barack Obama.
September 12th, 2008 1:04 am
Palin tries to defend qualifications in interview
Associated Press
FORT WAINWRIGHT, Alaska – John McCain running mate Sarah Palin sought Thursday to defend her qualifications but struggled with foreign policy, unable to describe President Bush's doctrine of pre-emptive strikes against threatening nations and acknowledging she's never met a foreign head of state.
The Republican vice presidential nominee told Charles Gibson of ABC News in her first televised interview since being named to the GOP ticket that "I'm ready" to be president if called upon. However, she sidestepped on whether she had the national security credentials needed to be commander in chief.
Palin, 44, has been Alaska's governor for less than two years and before that was a small-town mayor. She was McCain's surprise selection for the No. 2 slot on the ticket, raising questions about her readiness to serve in the White House, particularly during wartime.
McCain has defended her qualifications, citing her command of the Alaska National Guard and Alaska's proximity to Russia.
Asked whether those were sufficient credentials, Palin said: "It is about reform of government and it's about putting government back on the side of the people, and that has much to do with foreign policy and national security issues." She said she brings expertise in making the country energy independent as a former chairman of the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission.
She acknowledged that national security encompasses more than energy but said: "I want you to not lose sight of the fact that energy is a foundation of national security."
Palin said other than a trip to visit soldiers in Kuwait and Germany last year — "a trip of a lifetime" that "changed my life" — her only other foreign travel was to Mexico and Canada. She also said she had never met a head of state and added: "If you go back in history and if you ask that question of many vice presidents, they may have the same answer that I just gave you."
Pressed about what insights into recent Russian actions she gained by living in Alaska, Palin answered: "They're our next door neighbors and you can actually see Russia from land here in Alaska, from an island in Alaska."
Foreign policy questions dominated the first of three interviews Palin was giving Gibson over two days.
In the interview Thursday, Palin:
_Appeared unsure of the Bush doctrine — essentially that the United States must help spread democracy to stop terrorism and that the nation will act pre-emptively to stop potential foes.
Asked whether she agreed with that, Palin said: "In what respect, Charlie?" Gibson pressed her for an interpretation of it. She said: "His world view." That prompted Gibson to say "no, the Bush doctrine, enunciated September 2002, before the Iraq war" and describe it to her.
"I believe that what President Bush has attempted to do is rid this world of Islamic extremism, terrorists who are hell bent on destroying our nation," Palin said, though added "there have been mistakes made."
Pressed repeatedly on whether the United States could attack terrorist hideouts in Pakistan without the country's permission, she said: "If there is legitimate and enough intelligence that tells us that a strike is imminent against American people, we have every right to defend our country. In fact, the president has the obligation, the duty to defend."
_Said nuclear weapons in Iran's hands are dangerous, and said "we've got to put the pressure on Iran." Asked three times what her position would be if Israel felt threatened enough to attack Iranian nuclear facilities, Palin repeatedly said the United States shouldn't "second guess" Israel's steps to secure itself.
_Called for Georgia and the Ukraine to be included in NATO, a treaty that requires the U.S. to defend them militarily. She also said Russia's attack into Georgia last month was "unprovoked." Asked to clarify that she'd support going to war over Georgia, she said: "Perhaps so."
"I mean, that is the agreement when you are a NATO ally, is if another country is attacked, you're going to be expected to be called upon and help," she said.
_Said she "didn't hesitate" when McCain asked her to be his running mate. "I answered him 'yes' because I have the confidence in that readiness and knowing that you can't blink, you have to be wired in a way of being so committed to the mission, the mission that we're on, reform of this country and victory in the war, you can't blink. So I didn't blink then even when asked to run as his running mate."
_Contradicted an assertion she made at her former church that "our national leaders are sending U.S. soldiers on a task that is from God." Asked whether she thought the United States was fighting a holy war, she said she meant to convey that she agreed with Abraham Lincoln's quote that "I would never presume to know God's will or to speak God's words."
Later, in the second interview, Palin said she broke from McCain on climate change and oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska. McCain has said humans have caused climate change and the federal government shouldn't permit drilling in the federally protected wildlife reserve.
Palin, however, said: "I believe that man's activities certainly can be contributing to the issue of global warming, climate change. ... Regardless though of the reason for climate change, whether it's entirely, wholly caused by man's activities or is part of the cyclical nature of our planet — the warming and the cooling trends — regardless of that, John McCain and I agree that we gotta do something about it."
On ANWR, she said: "We'll agree to disagree but I'm gonna keep pushing that and I think eventually we're all gonna come together on that one."
