But now Barack has given us just the right slogan with which to respond to every instance of this crap: “Enough is enough!”

http://tpmelectioncentral.talkingpointsmemo.com/2008/09/obama_spare_me_the_phony_outra.php

“That’s just rain on your leg”? Are you implying that Obama wants to pee on Sarah Palin’s pigs? I smell a McCain ad.

http://thesebastards.blogspot.com/

It rains on McCain’s leg when he forgets to wear his Depends.

It goes back farther than Rove, ummell. It’s exactly what Perlstein described in Nisonland—hit your opponent, and when said opponent hits back, act like you’re the victim.

OK, so I don’t usually go over and read The COrner, because it’s just too stupid.

But wow.  The stupid.  It <strike>burns</strike> vaporizes.

Because I imagine that, yes, when someone wants to make a case about McCain’s “story”, they will probably talk about oh, I dunno, the fact that he and his wife chose to adopt a child from Bangladesh.  They might talk about McCain’s young daughter who has been on the campaign trail with him.  I mean, I know there’s a temptation to pretend that he spent his entire life locked in a basement, went off to Vietnam, got shot down, spent FIVE AND A HALF YEARS as a POW, and then went directly back into his cage to await his run for president in 2008.  But it certainly doesn’t come from the left, I’ll tell you that.

This is the hallmark of the McCain campaign’s strategy:  throw everything you possibly can at Obama to give people a reason not to vote for him.  That’s all they’ve got.  I’m not saying this means the Obama campaign can rest easy - Americans, despite their protestations, love nastiness in politics - but I don’t think the current political landscape lends itself well to this strategy.  We’ll see.

“It rains on McCain’s leg when he forgets to wear his Depends. “

Vitter’s, too.

The lipstick on a pig thing is unreal.  They have used the acronym PIAPS to DIRECTLY refer to Hillary for ages, and now, in addition to suddenly expecting her supporters to flock over to McCain/Palin, get outraged when just the word “pig” is used in an UNRELATED CONTEXT TO ANY PERSON.

Unbelievable.

Check me on this. Didn’t Obama just *compliment* her? Saying that he admires folks who think they can handle 5 kids?

Look… I’m not a parent, but I’ve heard parents talk. Isn’t that the kind of parent-to-parent talk that is taken as a compliment? Or, maybe as a bit of self-deprecation? (“I don’t know how you handle *five* kids, I can barely handle my two!”) Or envy?

To me, it sounds like an attempt to show some genuine human feelings towards her.

I have been an Obama supporter since I voted for him in one of the first primaries in the nation.  I am a Pandagonian feminist.  I agree that most of the Republican cries of sexism are self-serving bullshit.
I agree that Obama is better for women and that Palin is a sexist. 

But I gotta say the comment Schiffren points out REALLY bothers me. I really wish Obama hadn’t gone there. It does scream “sexist dogwhistle” to me (unlike the lipstick-pig thing).  He is trying to stress the mother-with-five-kids angle to the people who DO have a double standard about working mothers, while maintaining plausible deniability.  He is dressing it up as praise for Palin, but would he ever “praise” a male candidate on the same basis? Would anyone think to mention how “exhausting” a male candidate’s fatherhood duties are?  Why the hell else would he bring it up other than to resonate with people who believe you can’t be a mother and a candidate at the same time?

Trust me, I would love to be persuaded that this was a harmless comment, but I see it as nasty, stealth sexism.  I am still voting for Obama of course because it is the issues that matter, but this leaves me with a queasy feeling.

No, see you don’t understand.  Anytime a male politician mentions a female politician’s personal life in any way., what he really means is that she’s not a “real” politician and her family life is the only legitimate aspect of her personality.

But I gotta say the comment Schiffren points out REALLY bothers me. I really wish Obama hadn’t gone there. It does scream “sexist dogwhistle” to me (unlike the lipstick-pig thing).  He is trying to stress the mother-with-five-kids angle to the people who DO have a double standard about working mothers, while maintaining plausible deniability.

If you look at the context for the quote, it’s obvious that this isn’t true.  I saw a longer version of this soundbite on the news last night, and I took from it that he was calling out how “nice” it is that Palin has this nifty personal narrative, but, uhhhh, hello, running for VP isn’t a popularity contest.  It’s not a reality show where you can get voted off because Tyra or Tom Collichio or Tim Gunn doesn’t think you work well with others.  It’s great that she’s got 5 kids, loves Jesus, has a snowmobile, hunts moose in her spare time.  But that’s not how you’re supposed to decide who to vote for.  You’re supposed to look at things like issues, experience, what kinds of policies they’d like to enact.  And as charming as Palin might be, she’s miserable by any appropriate political metric .

I’ll also say that this line of argument is ridiculous in tlight of how the Republicans have used Palin so far.  They’ve deliberately downplayed her politics in favor of her “narrative”.  Which makes said narrative fair game.  Especially since they don’t want the Dems talking about her politics, either.

Right on Margaret.  Picture the reaction to the quote in the primaries with a different heroine but the same feel:

...you know Hillary Clinton is an interesting story.” The crowd booed. “No, she’s been First Lady!” Obama said. “She hasn’t been on the scene, you know, she raised her daughter and my hat goes off to anybody who’s looking after children. I’ve got two and they tire Michelle and me out!

The Hillaryites would have lost their minds:

She’s a Senator! (Palin’s a Governor) she’s not just a wife and a baby raiser!

Thanks, Opoponax.  You are right that I haven’t seen the whole context on this one.  I still have my eyes narrowed skeptically, but will reserve judgment.  (Can anyone point me in the right direction for a transcript of Obama’s full remarks?)

Of course, what bothers me more than any stray dogwhistles Obama may lob is the cynical exploitation by the Republicans of an issue (sexism) that they have never cared about before.  They are exploiting it to distract voters from the issues and, as a bonus point, to try to undermine the whole concept of sexism itself.  It is probably a brilliant tactic on their part, but it is unprincipled and doesn’t serve the public in any way.  Bleah.

By the way, the point I was making by mentioning Palin’s autobiography is that no one’s called attention to the fact that Palin has five kids, and implied that this is part of her qualifications, more than Palin and McCain have.

That doesn’t exempt it from the possibility of sexism, for obvious reasons, but it does raise the question of just who’s pissing on whose leg, if I may beat a dead metaphor with a sik purse. Or something.

Margaret, don’t know if you’re a concern troll or not. But if you’re not, please keep this handy rule in mind: If the Republicans are pushing a narrative, you can bet your last dollar that they’re lying.

There’s this great parable about the GOP. A guy was getting ready to ford a fairly large stream, and he meets this snake on the creekbed.

“Help me get across the stream, man,” says the snake. “I can’t swim!”

“Gimme a break,” says the man. “You’re a snake. You’ll bite me when we get on the other side!”

“No, I promise I won’t,” says the snake. “You’ve got my solemn word of honor.”

So the guy relents, picks up the snake, and walks across the stream. Once he gets on the other side, he puts the snake down, and it immediately bites him on the hand.

As he’s dying, he says, “Why did you bite me? You made a solemn promise not to bite me.”

“You knew what I was when you picked me up,” says the snake as it slithers off.

The moral: You can’t trust the fucking snakes.

Margaret,

I think it should also be remembered that it’s traditional for a politician to say SOMETHING nice about the opposing party, and especially for Obama (aka. “Scary Angry Person”).

Honestly, I can’t think of much else to praise Palin for, and any attempts at half-praise (“She’s really determined to…uh…ban books!”, “She’s really protective of…uh…her pregnant daughter and the shotgun wedding,” “She loves animals…grilled OR broiled!”) would be seen as a blatant attempt to pick on the “poor lil wommin”. And the Right HAVE been emphasizing her motherhood CONSTANTLY since her initial entry onto the presidential stage.

So I really do think it’s fair to say, “Well, whatever else she may be, she has the energy to raise 5 kids and that deserves a hat tip.”

I try not to have stars in my eyes, but this honestly seems innocent to me. Maybe I’m naive.

Picture the reaction to the quote in the primaries with a different heroine

But that would be a different situation.  Clinton ran on her stances on the issues, policy ideas, and political career.  She talked openly about those things and didn’t try to hide any of that.  She didn’t try to play up her family situation, religion, or sooper kewl hobbies. 

At this point, Palin’s personal narative is all the McCain campaign are willing to talk about, and they actually have the nerve to act like people trying to learn about Palin’s political experience and stances on the issues are “digging dirt”!  What else can you do but work with what you’re given?

I am really, really not a concern troll (you’ll have to take my word for it). I do think that what the Republicans are doing is far worse for women than any allegedly sexixt comments by Obama, not only in terms of their policies, but also in terms of their campaign strategy to turn the idea of “sexism” around on the Dems.

That said, my feeling (without having read the transcript) is that I wish Obama hadn’t gone there. Lots of male politicians promote their fatherhood, but we all sort of take it for granted that they have enough support by wives and others to be able to handle both fatherhood and politics. So I don’t like the idea of turning Palin’s motherhood-narrative around on her in this way.

If Obama had to praise Palin, I would have vastly preferred Biden’s tactic of praising Palin as a tough, shrewd politician. I like the idea of building her up as a tough, smart, sharp-elbowed politician and then creaming her in the debate because she knows jack shit about the issues.

She’s not a “tough, smart politician”. She’s a vicious, lying, moronic, batshit crazy accidental Governor who happened to be in the right place at the right time in a joke of a one-horse state.

If Obama had to praise Palin, I would have vastly preferred Biden’s tactic of praising Palin as a tough, shrewd politician.

So you want him to lie? Kidding, I LOL.

But, seriously, would this have been perceived as any less of a sexist insult? I can already see it now - “Everyone KNOWS ‘tough’ for a woman is just code for ‘B-I-T-C-H’!”

To me, this is starting to feel like the “outrage” when Kerry mentioned Cheney’s lesbian daughter in the 2004 debates.  Never mind that she was fully and publicly out.  Never mind that she was making her living as the Gay and Lesbian Liaison for Coors Brewing Company.  No, it was an outrage that Kerry mentioned that she was—OMG—gay!

The Republicans can’t claim she’s qualified because she has 5 kids and then scream when someone points out that having 5 kids does not qualify you to be Vice President of the United States.  If you’re going to claim that something is a qualification, you have to expect your opponents to bring it up.

I am all in favor of saying that having five kids, by itself, does not qualify you to be VP.  But that’s different than saying having five kids disqualifies you from being VP because it is too much responsibility.  That’s the aspect that bothers me. 

There is so much else we can go after her on.  For me, she is the first politician who genuinely has me waking up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat. And it’s not only her anti-woman, anti-science orientation, it is also the fact that she is a compeletely random, untested, unknown person who knows nothing about what’s going on on the national stage but yet could easily be President of the United States in just a few months time. It’s not implausible that McCain could get elected and immediately croak. That scares the ever living shit out of me, and I have to believe that a lot of Americans would agree. 

Also, what the hell does this say about McCain that this is his choice of VP? To me, it screams a frightening recklessness, and lack of integrity, i.e. willingness to win cheap political points regardless of cost to the people. 

(By the way we are not going after McCain for being a flip-flopper? He’s flip-flopped more in his career than Kerry ever did.)

She’s even scarier, I think, than Margaret describes her. Think about it- she’s the FIRST actual Christian Fascist (as opposed to mainstream politicians who are merely willing to pander to them) to emerge as a potentially mass-marketable candidate. (Huckabee worried me this way for a while but didn’t turn out to have as broad appeal as I had feared. I suspect not being a Southerner is a big “stealth” advantage for Palin.) If she is allowed to build up her national standing as Vice President, look out.

But, seriously, would this have been perceived as any less of a sexist insult? I can already see it now - “Everyone KNOWS ‘tough’ for a woman is just code for ‘B-I-T-C-H’!”

Even though I am the one criticizing Obama in this one instance, I don’t want him walking on eggshells either.  We are going to have to deal with the fact that these people are going to say any criticism of Palin is sexist. 

But there is just so much to slam her on that has nothing to do with her being a woman or a mother.  The McCain campaign doesn’t even trust this woman enough to let her talk to the press and they want her to be our VP; that seems like ripe fodder right there. 

Plus, we can hammer away a la Jon Stewart at the fact that the Republicans never gave two shits about sexism before.

But that’s different than saying having five kids disqualifies you from being VP because it is too much responsibility.

Margaret, you have two choices right now.  Either go watch or read the speech, or STFU.  Because Obama said nothing of the kind, and implied nothing of the kind.  You can’t just distill two sentences from a speech and decide that CLEARLY, Obama meant X. 

You’re doing that thing where a wingnut hears that The Passion Of The Christ is a porno starring Jesus and decides that their most solemn duty is to get the film banned.  It’s not attractive.

Well, Op, even though you’re fucking rude, I agree with you that it is always better to look at remarks in context.  But I can’t find either video or transcript.  The more I think about it, though, the more I conlcude the following: Unless Obama is misquoted or there is some magical context that makes his words not about the inevitability of being exhausted if you are a mother with five kids, my concern with Obama’s statement stands. (Your explanation of the context did not make me feel warm and fuzzy.)

With male politicians, we assume they have wives or other resources to care for children, sick relatives, or other family pressures.  Unless Palin is claiming to be a full-time stay-at-home mother to her kids on top of being gov, I thinks she should get the same presumption.  I don’t hear her claiming that even though she uses her family as a political prop like virtually every other politician.

Margaret, here’s the quote from ABC.com:

Obama added that “it is not going to be easy ... John McCain has a compelling biography, you know Sarah Palin is an interesting story.”

The crowd booed.

“No, she’s new!” Obama said. “She hasn’t been on the scene, you know, she’s got five kids and my hat goes off to anybody who’s looking after five. I’ve got two and they tire Michelle and me out!”

Obama said that Palin has a compelling personal story—including having five kids.  There’s not even a hint in there that she shouldn’t be running because of those five kids.  He was actually defending Palin against the crowd who booed her.

Seriously, there’s no there there.

Yeah, I saw that, still don’t like it, still read it as a jibe with plausible deniability.  But lots of feminists I respect don’t see it that way, and it certainly isn’t changing my long-standing intention to vote for Obama.  I’ll be quiet now.

the inevitability of being exhausted if you are a mother with five kids

I’m sitting in the same room right now with at least two people who would attest that they are exhausted at the prospect of raising one child.  And they’re coworkers of mine, who have more advanced positions and make more money than I do, so I’m hardly trying to imply that they should be barefoot in the kitchen at home.

Mentioning that someone has 5 children does not amount to implication that they don’t belong in politics.  Period.  Had Obama gone on to talk about how she won’t be able to lead effectively because of all those kids, it would be one thing.  But he didn’t.  If I remember correctly, his next few sentences were about her hunting hobby.  The typical stuff in her official Republican crafted backstory, which is the only thing they’ll allow to get out about her in the media.

Oh, and btw, I’ve had a hard time vfinding video of this part of the speech, too, so I apologize for the above.  Though it’s still true—if you haven’t actually heard or read the speech, you have no standing to comment about what was or was not actually said.  The fact that this is only being quoted at all on conservative blogs is telling, and if I hadn’t heard it myself I would think they’d invented it.

I agree with Margaret about the point that kids would probably not be mentioned at all in a context like that if the VP candidate were a man, but I think that it would only be inappropriate for Obama to say this if he were the only one bringing it up - then it would seem like he were mocking her. In this context it seems like he’s giving a rundown of what the republicans are saying about Palin and how it will be hard to work against these narratives because many people believe these are good things for a person to do or be - some of which even Obama and many democrats would consider a good thing, like being a parent. It would make sense that’s he’s trying to make the point that we need to ignore the personal narrative and refocus everyone on the issues, because that is where McCain and Palin have poor defenses.

It seems like the thing we’re trying to disprove here is: is this a sexist dogwhistle? I really have to say no to that, partly because for someone to use a dogwhistle they have to believe it themselves and believe it’ll help them with their base. The largest amount of people that believe women can’t have kids and a job at the same time are Republican, and you’re looking for Dr. Laura or Phyllis Schlafly, not Obama, if you want to find someone who really thinks this is true. The other reason is because of the above context.

However, I think it’s right to hold our politicians and fellow progressives to a higher standard and seriously analyze the things they say for sexism. We’ve seen plenty of examples of democrats being imperfect on this issue, and we can see now that republicans are going to use the accusation of sexism to their advantage regardless of whether it’s true or not. Obama and others are really going to have to watch what they say to avoid wasting their time defending against things like this, which is obviously supposed to distract everyone from paying attention to the issues.

(Obscure movie memory moment).

Does anyone else now think of Palin as the cab driver in Total Recall with “five kids to feed”?

(And can’t you just hear her saying “Oh, it’s okay, I’m one of you…” or whatever the quote was? Up until… well, you know.)

Sorry… my brain is weird. (But you can’t say my username didnt’ warn you.)

Unless Obama is misquoted or there is some magical context that makes his words not about the inevitability of being exhausted if you are a mother with five kids, my concern with Obama’s statement stands.

He said that his kids tire him out, do you think Obama would go after Palin by disqualifying himself? “Vote for Obama, somewhat less exhausted than Palin!”