http://www.alternet.org/election08/106303/?page=1
Sayonara, Sarah Palin By Katha Pollitt, The Nation: November 10, 2008. God's gift to journalism -- and to feminism And so we bid farewell to Sarah Palin. How I'll miss her daily presence in my life! The mooseburgers, the wolf hunts, the kids named after bays and sports and trees and airplanes and who did not seem to go to school at all, the winks and blinks, the cute Alaska accent, the witch-hunting pastor and those great little flared jackets, especially the gray stripey one. People say she was a dingbat, but that is just sexist: the woman read everything, she said so herself; her knowledge of geography was unreal -- she knew just where to find the pro-America part of the country; and don't forget her keen interest in ancient history! Thanks largely to her, Bill Ayers is now the most famous sixtysomething professor in the country -- eat your heart out, Ward Churchill! You can snipe all you want, but she was truly God's gift: to Barack Obama, Katie Couric -- notice no one's making fun of America's sweetheart now -- Tina Fey and columnists all over America. She was also a gift to feminism. Seriously. I don't mean she was a feminist -- she told Couric she considered herself one, but in a later interview, perhaps after looking up the meaning of the word, coyly wondered why she needed to "label" herself. And I don't mean she had a claim on the votes of feminists or women -- why should women who care about equality vote for a woman who wants to take their rights away? Elaine Lafferty, a former editor of Ms., made a splash by revealing in The Daily Beast (Tina Brown's new website, for those of you still following the news on paper) that she has been working as a consultant to Palin. In a short but painful piece of public relations called "Sarah Palin's a Brainiac," Lafferty claimed to find in Palin "a mind that is thoughtful, curious, with a discernible pattern of associative thinking and insight," with a "photographic memory," as smart as legendary Senator Sam Ervin, "a woman who knows exactly who she is." According to Lafferty, all that stuff about library censorship and rape kits was just "nonsense" -- and feminists who held Palin's wish to criminalize abortion against her were Beltway feminist-establishment elitists who shop at Whole Foods when they should be voting against Barack Obama to make the Dems stop taking women for granted. So the first way Palin was good for feminism is that she helped us clarify what it isn't: feminism doesn't mean voting for "the woman" just because she's female, and it doesn't mean confusing self-injury with empowerment, like the Ellen Jamesians in The World According to Garp (I'll vote for the forced-childbirth candidate, that'll show Howard Dean!). It isn't just feel-good "you go, girl" appreciation of female moxie, which I cheerfully acknowledge Palin has by the gallon. As I wrote when she was selected, if she were my neighbor I would probably like her -- at least until she organized with her fellow Christians to ban abortion at the local hospital, as Palin did in the 1990s. Yes, feminism is about women getting their fair share of power, and that includes the top jobs -- but that can't take a back seat to policies that benefit all women: equality on the job and the legal framework that undergirds it, antiviolence, reproductive self-determination, healthcare, education, childcare and so on. Fortunately, women who care about equality get this -- dead-enders like the comically clueless Lynn Forester de Rothschild got lots of press, but in the end Obama won the support of the vast majority of women who had supported Hillary Clinton. Second, Palin's presence on the Republican ticket forced family-values conservatives to give public support to working mothers, equal marriages, pregnant teens and their much-maligned parents. Talk-show frothers, Christian zealots and professional antifeminists -- Rush Limbaugh and Phyllis Schlafly -- insisted that a mother of five, including a "special-needs" newborn, could perfectly well manage governing a state (a really big state, as we were frequently reminded), while simultaneously running for veep and, who knows, field-dressing a moose. No one said she belonged at home. No one said she was neglecting her husband or failing to be appropriately submissive to him. No one blamed her for 17-year-old Bristol's out-of-wedlock pregnancy or hard-partying high-school-dropout boyfriend. No one even wondered out loud why Bristol wasn't getting married before the baby arrived. All these things have officially morphed from sins to "challenges," just part of normal family life. No matter how strategic this newfound broadmindedness is, it will not be easy to row away from it. Thanks to Sarah, ladies, we can do just about anything we want as long as we don't have an abortion. Third, while Palin did not win the Hillary vote, the love she got from Republican women, including very conservative, traditional women, shows that what I like to call the feminism of everyday life is taking hold across the spectrum. That old frilly-doormat model of femininity is gone: even women who stay home and attend churches that bar women from the clergy thrill to the idea of women being all that they can be and taking their rightful place in the public realm. Like everyone else, they want respect and power, and now, finally, thanks to the women's movement they despise, they may actually get some. Finally, Palin completed the task Hillary Clinton began: running in different parties across a single political season, they have normalized the idea of a woman in the White House. It is hard even to remember now how iconoclastic Hillary was -- how hard it was for her to negotiate femininity and ambition, to be warm but not weak, smart but not cold, attractive but not sexy, dynamic but not threatening. Only a year ago, it was a real question whether men would vote for a woman or, for that matter, whether women would. Palin may have been unfit for high office, but just by running she showed there was more than one mode for a female politician. After almost two years of the whole country watching two very different women in the White House race, it finally seems normal. So thanks, Sarah. And now, please -- back to your iceberg. *** http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/10/opinion/10krugman.html?th&emc=th Franklin Delano Obama? By Paul Krugman NY Times Op-Ed: November 10, 2008 Suddenly, everything old is New Deal again. Reagan is out; F.D.R. is in. Still, how much guidance does the Roosevelt era really offer for today's world? The answer is, a lot. But Barack Obama should learn from F.D.R.'s failures as well as from his achievements: the truth is that the New Deal wasn't as successful in the short run as it was in the long run. And the reason for F.D.R.'s limited short-run success, which almost undid his whole program, was the fact that his economic policies were too cautious. About the New Deal's long-run achievements: the institutions F.D.R. built have proved both durable and essential. Indeed, those institutions remain the bedrock of our nation's economic stability. Imagine how much worse the financial crisis would be if the New Deal hadn't insured most bank deposits. Imagine how insecure older Americans would feel right now if Republicans had managed to dismantle Social Security. Can Mr. Obama achieve something comparable? Rahm Emanuel, Mr. Obama's new chief of staff, has declared that "you don't ever want a crisis to go to waste." Progressives hope that the Obama administration, like the New Deal, will respond to the current economic and financial crisis by creating institutions, especially a universal health care system, that will change the shape of American society for generations to come. But the new administration should try not to emulate a less successful aspect of the New Deal: its inadequate response to the Great Depression itself. Now, there's a whole intellectual industry, mainly operating out of right-wing think tanks, devoted to propagating the idea that F.D.R. actually made the Depression worse. So it's important to know that most of what you hear along those lines is based on deliberate misrepresentation of the facts. The New Deal brought real relief to most Americans. That said, F.D.R. did not, in fact, manage to engineer a full economic recovery during his first two terms. This failure is often cited as evidence against Keynesian economics, which says that increased public spending can get a stalled economy moving. But the definitive study of fiscal policy in the '30s, by the M.I.T. economist E. Cary Brown, reached a very different conclusion: fiscal stimulus was unsuccessful "not because it does not work, but because it was not tried." This may seem hard to believe. The New Deal famously placed millions of Americans on the public payroll via the Works Progress Administration and the Civilian Conservation Corps. To this day we drive on W.P.A.-built roads and send our children to W.P.A.-built schools. Didn't all these public works amount to a major fiscal stimulus? Well, it wasn't as major as you might think. The effects of federal public works spending were largely offset by other factors, notably a large tax increase, enacted by Herbert Hoover, whose full effects weren't felt until his successor took office. Also, expansionary policy at the federal level was undercut by spending cuts and tax increases at the state and local level. And F.D.R. wasn't just reluctant to pursue an all-out fiscal expansion - he was eager to return to conservative budget principles. That eagerness almost destroyed his legacy. After winning a smashing election victory in 1936, the Roosevelt administration cut spending and raised taxes, precipitating an economic relapse that drove the unemployment rate back into double digits and led to a major defeat in the 1938 midterm elections. What saved the economy, and the New Deal, was the enormous public works project known as World War II, which finally provided a fiscal stimulus adequate to the economy's needs. This history offers important lessons for the incoming administration. The political lesson is that economic missteps can quickly undermine an electoral mandate. Democrats won big last week - but they won even bigger in 1936, only to see their gains evaporate after the recession of 1937-38. Americans don't expect instant economic results from the incoming administration, but they do expect results, and Democrats' euphoria will be short-lived if they don't deliver an economic recovery. The economic lesson is the importance of doing enough. F.D.R. thought he was being prudent by reining in his spending plans; in reality, he was taking big risks with the economy and with his legacy. My advice to the Obama people is to figure out how much help they think the economy needs, then add 50 percent. It's much better, in a depressed economy, to err on the side of too much stimulus than on the side of too little. In short, Mr. Obama's chances of leading a new New Deal depend largely on whether his short-run economic plans are sufficiently bold. Progressives can only hope that he has the necessary audacity. ------------------------------------ --------------------------------------------------------------------------- LAAMN: Los Angeles Alternative Media Network --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Unsubscribe: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Subscribe: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Digest: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Help: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Post: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Archive1: <http://www.egroups.com/messages/laamn> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Archive2: <http://www.mail-archive.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Yahoo! 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