Jean Paul Gaultier’s muse: Sarah Palin. He also hired a 51 year old model for the runway show.
The Sarah Palin flash mob is a pretty great idea. (via.) Why? Because there are so many ways to play it: photoshopped Palin, moose huntin’ Palin, pageant Palin, debate Palin. All the other varieties are simple: a suit, a semi-beehive, glasses, and cheap-looking (preferably red) platform shoes. No one besides Madonna is that iconic in that many different looks.
Locution of passivity in VP debate (previously discussed here.) Global Language Monitor said in a report, Palin used the passive voice in 8 percent of her sentences, Biden only 5 percent of the time. The report explains, “passive voice can be used to deflect responsibility; Biden used active voice when referring to [Vice President Dick] Cheney and [President] Bush; Palin countered with passive deflections.”
Last night Sarah Palin appeared to be following a Cosmo listicle “Ten Ways to Get The Job! Bat your lashes, challenge your interviewer with a smile, and don’t forget to wink!” She is so Elle Woods it hurts to watch. Maybe I’ve been looking at the world through blue state colored glasses for too long, but I can’t even understand why she is considered attractive. Elizabeth Nolan Brown at Culture11 LadyBlog thinks she “managed to strike some weird balance of cute and tough and … it kind of works.” But I tend to agree with this comment on Ta-Nehisi Coates‘ site: “For many Boomer women, the primary sexist experience of their lives is: ‘Those men gave the job to that guy instead of me, even though I am more qualified and/or have more seniority.’ For many Gen X women like myself (and Palin is Gen X) the primary sexist experience is: ‘Those men gave the job to that clueless chick instead of me, because the boss thinks she’s hot and/or will be a yes-man with no ideas of her own.’”
In the comments of my last post about it, someone noted Michelle Obama’s outfit Friday is by Thakoon, who also designed the dress she wore at the last night of the DNC. Her wearing it, appears to be the most controversial thing that happened at the first debate. Ok, I would have worn several strands of black beads instead of the bow pin, but either way is was smart choice. It’s the kind of dress only a gallery assistant or preternaturally beautiful 40-something lawyer can get away with, (and she bought it off the rack, no stylist needed.) While designer Thakoon Panichgul has made a name for himself, he’s only 33, and this kind of exposure catapults him to a whole new level. By the way, Thakoon recently used a print showing roses with legs, a collaboration with one of my favorite artists, Laurie Simmons. In other politics and fashion news, “When Sarah Palin met Afghan president Hamid Karzai, she wore earrings in the shape of her home state of Alaska.”
Comedians can get away with saying a lot more than the rest of us: which might be why the media made such a fuss about Tina Fey as Sarah Palin. Also, Hockey Moms Against Sarah Palin.
“In 2000, Dick Cheney’s average rating was 46.5% favorable/18.5% unfavorable for a final result of +28% favorable, roughly 11% higher than Palin’s. His favorable rating wasn’t as high as Palin’s, but his unfavorable rating was much lower, an indication that Palin’s attack-laced speech on Wednesday drove up her unfavorables in addition to her favorables.” Biden and Palin have the highest unfavorable ratings since 2000, which probably shows lack of apathy in the election of 2008 more than anything else.
I’ve voiced a long list of complaints about professional women’s attire already, but another thing that bugs me is why is makeup considered necessary to the look? Female mentors are always telling me to put on lipstick and Palin’s zinger just reinforces this sense that I’m a slob unless my mouth is glossy and purple. I like eyeliner if I’m going to an indie rock show, but I can’t understand why a bare face is more radical than no pantyhose. The Telegraph writes about how to get Palin’s look (”He ‘barracuda’d me’ for the princely sum of £75.) The author describes the look as “feminine without being feminine … When a woman wants to be taken seriously she can go down one of two routes: she can read the Economist from cover to cover, inject a little environmental hand-wringing into her dinner party repertoire and take a vow never, ever to mention designer footwear in public. Or, she can tie her hair up and don a pair of glasses.”
It Was Never About Experience. This Election Is About Elitism
On NRO’s the Corner, Victor Davis Hanson’s answer to the question “Why Do We Like Palin?” pretty much nails exactly why Sarah Palin is the most polarizing candidate we’ve seen in the election so far (Yes, more so than HRC.)
Various reasons, but one I think is that millions of Americans are simply tired of being lectured at by smug elites. Jetting Al Gore made tens of millions finger-pointing at us about our global warming. Obama’s America, apparently unlike Rev. Wright’s Trinity Church, is a cruel, downright mean and dysfunctional place. John Kerry’s United States is one of the half-educated in need of Ivy-League enlightenment and tutorials.
So along comes someone (unlike Biden’s vastly inflated middle-class biography) who really is from the working class. She likes it—and finds snowmobiling, hunting, fishing and living in small-town America not as a wasteful use of carbon-emitting fuels, cruelty to animals, gratuitous depletion of our resources, or proof of parochial yokelism. Instead it is a life of action in an often harsh natural landscape, where physical strength is married to intelligence to bring us food, fuel, and progress.
Palin’s symbolism is the antithesis of the metrosexual wind- or body- surfing politican, and hair-plugged, neurotic TV pundit So at this time, right now, millions apparently like Palin’s atypical 19th-century profile. Again, it’s a pleasant change of pace from Harvard Law School, DC politics, “community organizing” and the can’t-do, ‘they raised the bar on me’ collective complaint.
If she can beat off the frothing Newsweek/MSNBC/New York Times inbred rabid wolves, and do it with the grace she has shown so far, she will fill a deep yearning among Americans for someone like her. A lot of Americans, if they watch reality shows, prefer truckers on ice or Bering Sea crab fishing to endless psychodramas of thirty-something suburban whiners.
So apparently they are eager to see a rare politican who is unapologetic about America’s past achievements (cf. Obama’s “tragic history” and need for more “oppression studies”), and who reminds us with pride that a muscular world of action, not community organizing, creates the bounty that others use and take for granted but so often sneer at the methods of its acquisition.
Right now, there are millions rooting for her in a way not true of Biden—and many who are criticizing her don’t have a clue why that it is so.
Well I know why I’m criticizing her, and that is because I’m a libertarian and I remember the election of 2000. Her “reforming” political views and “down-to-earth” “symbolism” only remind me of George W. Bush in his first run for president. Naturally, it wasn’t the huntin’ and fishin’ that won over independents/libertarians, but his platform on limited government, free trade, and non-interventionist foreign policy. When you think about it, Bush in 2000 sounded a lot more like Ron Paul than John McCain today. From a libertarian’s perspective now, the worst thing Democrats can do is raise taxes. But I can’t even conceive of the worst possible Republican actions because the party has consistently gone beyond my most cynical expectations.
Foreign policy is the president’s direct responsibility, the economy is mostly out of his hands (Not that they’re unrelated: a hugely expensive war doesn’t help things.) Andrew Sullivan wrote, “Do you really believe that Sarah Palin understands the distinctions between Shia and Sunni, has an opinion about the future of Pakistan, has a view of how to exploit rifts within Tehran’s leadership, knows about the tricky task of securing loose nuclear weapons? Does anyone even know if she has ever expressed a view on these matters?”
I don’t fear Palin is the female Quayle but potentially the female GWB: a weak leader nevertheless capable of getting elected for the likability factor, falling under the influence of the people surrounding her while moving up the ranks. Remember, Bush had “executive experience” as a governor of Texas before the presidency. And they share a speechwriter.
From the Washington Post: Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and McCain campaign manager Rick Davis “suggest Palin would be able to handle foreign policy matters by leaning heavily on McCain’s staff.” You aren’t electing a person, you’re electing a party.
While much is made about her lack of “experience” canceling out Obama’s, now the Palin pick finally makes sense: this election is about “elitism.” As Ta-Nehisi Coates writes, “The entire Sarah Palin pick comes down to one thing–the hope that George Clooney, Scarlett Johansson, or (God forbid) Will.I.Am. will make a joke about moose-burgers.”
Class in our country isn’t well examined or understood, mostly as the division has much to do with race relations. And that makes Obama’s “elite” status so bizarre given his race and upbringing.
To the GOP, “elite” has nothing to do with money or race. It has to do with “values.” “Elite” is any social liberal. Which is why the left badly needs to reframe this debate and claim its side of the culture war as reasoned, principled, logical, honorable, any word other than something suggesting the result of a college education.
It all comes back to Karl Rove’s remark, “Even if you never met him, you know this guy… He’s the guy at the country club with the beautiful date, holding a martini and a cigarette that stands against the wall and makes snide comments about everyone who passes by.”
As Jon Stewart put it, “Doesn’t elite mean good?…This job you’re applying for — if you get it, and it goes well, they might carve your head in a mountain. If you don’t actually think you’re better than us than what the fuck are you doing?”
(BTW, if I had Photoshop on this computer I’d impose Palin and McCain’s faces on Grant Wood’s painting. And oh, maybe mash-up Cindy McCain and Marie-Antoinette.)
Update 9/4/08: More Sarah Palin 2008 = George W. Bush 2000 articles now. Sarah Palin’s real soul mate in Salon and George W. Palin in Huffington Post
Previously:
Boris Johnson isn’t London’s New Bicycle
How to Frame the Internet: Attention and the New News Cycle
Related links:
- It’s an Election, Not a Revolution, Tyler Cowen in NYT
- Book: The Bush Betrayal, James Bovard
- Don’t LOL. Palin Pick Is About Taking On Washington — Not About Gender, Joe Trippi
- Liberty Island, The American Prospect
- President Camacho Speech from Idiocracy
- The View on Palin from an Alaskan Anti-Real ID Activist and Democrat, Reason
I got an A in stats in college and am usually good with it, but was confused by William Saletan’s numbers in his article The Invisible Pregnancies of Presidential Daughters. “So if you factor age into the equation, the rate of unintended pregnancy among 18- to 29-year-olds in the higher income bracket is probably around 6 percent to 7 percent.
An unintended pregnancy rate of 6 to 7 percent, in a population of 37 women, means two to three pregnancies per year.” Then I realized the whole article is junk. It does however prove that you can publish anything on the internet — at least for the next three days — so long as you work a Sarah Palin reference in there.
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