by Gail Collins
“WOMEN IN AMERICA AREN’T FINISHED YET.”
Clinton’s defeat left many of her supporters feeling both sad and, in some cases, angry enough to ignore her pleas to rally around Obama. “I thought I would vote for McCain,” said Himilce Novas. “I wanted to show a lesson to the Democratic Party for not having chosen Hillary. This was her time.”
Until 2008 men had always been the stars of presidential elections, and it seemed as if women were going to fall back into their familiar roles as undecided voters—the soccer moms and Wal-Mart moms and waitress moms who figured so prominently in the projections of political consultants. Then, on the day after the Democratic convention ended, John McCain suddenly announced that his vice presidential pick was Sarah Palin, the 44-year-old Alaska governor.
“It turns out that women in America aren’t finished yet!” Palin told the cheering crowd at her acceptance speech.
Very few people had ever heard of Palin. She had been in office for less than two years, and Alaska—with a population of only 670,000—was a remote territory to most Americans in the Lower 48. Even McCain had met her only once, briefly, before he invited her to his home in Arizona to discuss being on the ticket. The initial reaction among the pundits, politicians, and journalists who make up the nation’s chattering class was a kind of stunned silence, followed by predictions of disaster. McCain surrogates such as Senator Lindsey Graham raced around the Republican convention in Minneapolis, assuring everyone that voters would love Sarah because they would feel she was just like them.
All the carping stopped when Palin gave her acceptance speech. The script might have been the work of a veteran Republican speechwriter, but she delivered it with an energy, humor, and passion that stood out from the boilerplate rhetoric that dominated the convention oratory. She became an overnight star. People loved her spirit and the pride she showed in her baby, Trig, who was born with Down syndrome. She was a heady package—vice presidential candidate as action figure. The public learned that she had decorated her office in the capital with the skin of a grizzly her father had killed, and fired the gubernatorial cook, declaring the kids would be fine with mac and cheese. Her handsome husband was part Yupik Eskimo, a union member, and a snowmobile champion. “Women like her most of all because she is a woman who is unafraid to push men around, and punch even before being provoked,” enthused Newsweek. And Palin was also young and attractive—the Web site Wonkette had called her “the hottest governor.”
Although Palin’s political convictions seemed a little vague, she was very definitely conservative, most particularly when it came to matters such as abortion. The social conservatives who formed the Republican Party’s most important base, and who had never felt much attachment to McCain, suddenly discovered a new heroine. Surprisingly, a lot of Hillary’s most disappointed fans were intrigued, too. Women voters had never shown much inclination to support female candidates unless they shared their political persuasion, and since Clinton and Palin came from opposite ends of the spectrum, that should have made the Republican vice presidential nominee a hard sell for the Hillaryites. But after her smashing debut at the convention, Newsweek reported that thanks to “the Palin Effect,” one in three white women said she was more likely to vote for McCain than before the nomination was announced.
As Palin traveled around the country from rally to rally, her crowds were often far larger and more enthusiastic than McCain’s. When they were together, she would wow the audience, introduce her running mate—and then people would start to drift away when the man at the top of the ticket launched into his stump speech. Voters loved her or hated her. At first, she was credited with giving her ticket a desperately needed boost. Later, she was blamed for undermining public confidence in McCain’s ability to choose good people for his team. But in a country where vice presidential candidates were generally regarded as an afterthought, people couldn’t stop talking about Sarah Palin.
“SARAH BARRACUDA.”
Sarah Heath grew up in Wasilla, a small, unlovely exurb forty miles from Fairbanks, where people sometimes called themselves “Valley Trash” to make it clear that they knew the city dwellers looked down on them and that they didn’t care. Palin remembered growing up in “a large busy family, where gender was never really an issue…. My dad expected us to be back there chopping wood and snowmachining with the rest of them, hunting and fishing and doing all those things that were quite Alaskan.” (When asked during her gubernatorial campaign to name her favorite meal, Palin said, “Moose stew after a day of snowmachining.”) She was a feisty high school basketball player who got the nickname “Sarah Barracuda” as she led her team to the state championship. She once called that victory the “turning point of my life,” and later, when she would try to place herself in the context of the women’s movement, she would almost always frame her remarks around Title IX and giving girls equal opportunity to play sports.
Sarah grew up in the world the women’s movement had created, and she seems never to have felt constrained by her gender. But like most people in Wasilla, male and female, she did not nourish any grand career plans. Her sister said the only goal they talked about was having children. Sarah roamed through four colleges in five years, never leaving much of an impression. After graduation, she came home to Wasilla, had a brief career in sports reporting, then eloped with her high school boyfriend, Todd Palin. The newlyweds quickly had two children. Sarah helped with Todd’s fishing business, joined the PTA, went to exercise classes, and hunted. (“The protein her family eats comes from fish she has pulled out of the ocean with her own hands and caribou she has shot,” Vogue would later enthuse.)
In 1992, when Palin was 28, the mayor of Wasilla and a group of his supporters recruited her to run for city council as part of a plan to bring in new blood that would, they hoped, back a sales tax to pay for a local police department. (The smallness of Wasilla politics is written in that first triumph; she won the council election, 530 to 310.) Looking back on her political ascension, Palin would describe herself as a reformer—or, during the 2008 campaign, inevitably, “a maverick”—who waged war against “the old boys’ club.” But the Wasilla version of the old boys originally thought of themselves as mentors, grooming a nice young mother who could be a conduit to the younger generation of Wasilla voters. John Stein, the mayor, was stunned when he discovered that she intended to run against him in 1996. The entire power structure was stunned when she won and swiftly began firing town officials and replacing them with her own people. “None of that ‘Sarah Barracuda’ stuff came out until she ran for mayor. But then, boy, did it,” Stein said.
It was a pattern that she repeated in her quick rise to the top of Alaska politics. And all the while she was raising a growing family. The Palins’ third child, Willow, was born in 1995. While she was mayor, Sarah had another daughter, Piper, and, in a legendary feat of frontier grit, was back at work a day after the delivery. While she was in her second year as governor and lobbying behind the scenes for that vice presidential slot, she had a fifth baby, Trig, after a pregnancy she kept secret even from most of her family until the seventh month. Once again she was back at work within a couple of days.
Palin was a pattern-breaker when it came to the politics-family divide. Traditionally, men started running for office early, while most women waited until their children were grown, and that often left women at the back of the line when it came to getting the best nominations for the highest posts. (While the 2008 election would bring another record number of women into the U.S. House and Senate, their proportion was still under 20 percent in both chambers.) But Palin’s large, still-young family did not seem to stand in her way at all. Many young Republican women saw an image of the way they wanted to be—a hard-charging professional who could balance an active family and an outside-the-box, challenging job. “I mean, how cool to have a young woman on the ticket who’s doing exactly what I want to do when I grow up,” said Jennifer Huddleston, a Wellesley senior who was campaigning for the McC
ain team in New Hampshire.
“I NEVER THOUGHT I’D HAVE TO RAISE A FAMILY ALONE.”
When Hillary Clinton ran for president, no one asked how she was going to balance work and family. Her daughter was grown, and it was pretty clear that Bill could take care of himself. But with Palin, voters were reminded constantly of the issue—this was, after all, the first vice presidential candidate in history to take a breast pump on the campaign trail. After her nomination, the nation flung itself into a debate over whether she could possibly have time for all her responsibilities. In a roundup of national reaction, the New York Times found a mother of two in Alabama who was initially impressed but then lost confidence in Palin’s judgment after reading that she returned to work three days after Trig was born. There was an evangelical Christian from Ohio who liked the whole package (“The whole family is pro-life, and they put that into practice even when it’s not easy”), and another evangelical from Maine who didn’t (“A mother with a 4-month-old infant with Down syndrome taking up full-time campaigning? Not my value set”). Phyllis Schlafly, who had been at the Republican convention watching Palin accept the nomination (and making sure a stern anti-abortion plank was hammered into the party platform), couldn’t see what the fuss was about. “People who don’t have children or who have only one or two are kind of overwhelmed at the notion of five children. I think a hardworking, well-organized CEO type can handle it well,” she said.
Palin responded to the questions by pointing out that this was something no one would ever ask a man. When people wondered how she could be governor with so many kids, she had always said, “How in the world did any other governor do it with four kids or six kids or however many kids they had?” Rather quickly, the country seemed to agree, and the debate subsided. It was, after all, a consensus that many people thought the nation had reached in the ’60s and ’70s.
Barack Obama had two young daughters, so both tickets featured a candidate with small children. The presidential campaign should have been the ideal platform for a national discussion about the difficulties in balancing work and family responsibilities. But somehow that never percolated to the top, even though Michelle Obama made work-family stress her signature issue. Palin constantly referred to herself as a mother, suggesting that the experience of raising children gave her a special insight into the feelings and needs of average Americans. (Obama, who sent out a clear signal that his campaign was to stick to attacking McCain and leave Palin alone, seemed to agree, sort of, as he damned her with faint praise. “I mean, mother, governor, moose-shooter. I mean, I think that’s cool, that’s cool stuff,” he told a crowd who started to boo at the mention of her name.) But although Palin talked about her family in every public appearance, she never really said much about the challenge American women faced in trying to do it all. Theoretical thinking about large social problems was not generally her strong suit, and she avoided discussions that focused on the difficulties of modern women’s lives. When asked about how she could hold down a demanding job and raise a family at the same time, she simply said, “I’m part of that generation where the question is kind of irrelevant because it’s accepted.”
Michelle Obama had a more conflicted view. When she married and had children, Michelle seemed destined to become a nonfictional version of that other African-American lawyer-mom, Clair Huxtable. She had degrees from Princeton and Harvard Law, a series of great jobs, two adorable daughters, a three-story Georgian Revival house in a diverse, upscale neighborhood near her work, and a husband who outstripped even Bill Cosby’s ideal dad. But she discovered it wasn’t possible to have it all. “That was a shock to me,” she said. “Nobody prepared me for this. We have to be realistic and honest with young women and families about what they will confront, because to say, ‘You can do it all and should do it all,’ and not to get the support, to me is frustrating.”
When Michelle gave birth to her second daughter and Barack’s political career went into high gear, she reduced her hours at the University of Chicago, where she was an administrator, but found her part-time job “had a funny way of expanding.” Her husband wrote about the strain on their marriage when Michelle found herself saddled with all the household responsibilities: “My failure to clean up the kitchen suddenly became less endearing. Leaning down to kiss Michelle good-bye in the morning, all I would get was a peck on the cheek. By the time Sasha was born—just as beautiful and almost as calm as her sister—my wife’s anger toward me seemed barely contained. ‘You only think about yourself,’ she would tell me. ‘I never thought I’d have to raise a family alone.’ ”
As Michelle saw it, young women shouldn’t have to give up on either career or children, “but it becomes a choice you have to make if child care isn’t available and salaries aren’t high enough to pay off your debt that it took to get the degree, to get the job you’re in.” During the presidential campaign, she traveled around the country holding roundtable discussions with working mothers. They talked about their inability to find affordable day care, the difficulty of getting time off to tend to sick children or sick parents, and the crushing debt that burdened women who tried to lift themselves up by getting college degrees. (College debt was a favorite issue for the Obamas, who had been saddled with six figures’ worth until Barack’s famous speech at the 2004 Democratic convention translated into a big book contract that allowed them to pay off the loans.) Michelle was haunted by her meeting with a single mother in her 40s who had gone back to school to get an MBA and was struggling to pay off $100,000 in student loans while supporting an ailing mother and two children in college. And Barack’s own sister, Michelle said, was trying to figure out whether she and her husband could afford to have a second child, even though they both had PhDs: “They don’t know how they would pay for the cost of child care for a second child—it would wipe out one of their incomes.”
Michelle Obama and Sarah Palin were almost exactly the same age, and in their private lives, they both found the answer to work-family tensions in willing relatives. As Hillary Clinton might have said, they had their own villages (or maybe even the equivalent of a commune). Palin’s parents and sisters lived nearby and formed an extended family that assumed much of the responsibility for looking after her children, and Todd, whose employers seemed to take a benevolent attitude toward his schedule, was available much of the time. Michelle, who had grown up in Chicago, relied on a network of friends and her widowed mother, Marian Robinson, who moved with them to Washington after the election.
But there were differences. Palin lived in the equivalent of the last Western frontier, a culture where the scarcity of women had always made men more willing to allow them some space. Alaska had never had a female governor before Palin, but once the state got one, people seemed to take an easygoing attitude toward the way she juggled her responsibilities. “There’s a greater tolerance here for the integration of family and work,” said Gerald McBeath, the chair of the political science department at the University of Alaska. “My students will bring their babies to class, and as long as they’re quiet I don’t object. It happens quite often.” Palin nursed Trig during state budget meetings and took her daughters with her when she traveled to governors’ conferences. Her staff apparently didn’t object to her habit of bringing the children to the office, and no one questioned what Trig and the girls were doing on the plane when she traveled to out-of-town events. During the vice presidential campaign, reporters discovered that Palin had gotten Alaska to pay for the kids’ plane tickets and hotel rooms, claiming that they, too, were engaged in state business.
Palin had been able to mix her two roles, unlike most working mothers, whose employers preferred not to be reminded that there were competing demands on their time. One of the most infamous cases of how complicated and stressful things could get in the Lower 48 involved Jane Swift, a Massachusetts Republican who was elected lieutenant governor in 1999 when she was pregnant with her first child. Swift got into trouble when capitol staff complained they were be
ing dragooned into babysitting, and she made things much worse by claiming that nobody could possibly object to taking care of a baby as adorable as her Elizabeth. When the governor resigned and Swift became acting chief executive, she was pregnant again, with twins, and the hostility toward her was so intense that her opponents tried to keep her from doing state business over the phone when she was confined to bed rest. There was another controversy when she commandeered a state helicopter to fly her home when her daughter was sick. In the end Swift decided to drop her plans to run for governor and retired to private life. “The feeling that I let down my staff, my family, and the public by my actions… continues to nag at me,” she wrote years later.
“SHE IS PHYLLIS SCHLAFLY, ONLY YOUNGER.”
Palin, on the other hand, presented a picture of an almost effortless mix of work and family. (A reporter who followed her around after she was elected governor watched her juggle “two BlackBerrys and a cell phone with one always buzzing” yet appear to be unfazed, “indeed to be having fun,” even when she locked her keys in her car and had to borrow her son’s jalopy to drive off with her children to the next engagement.) It charmed some women and irritated others. Veterans of the women’s movement looked at her and remembered another superachieving Republican wife and mother who had used her extraordinary skills to undermine their feminist agenda. “She is Phyllis Schlafly, only younger,” wrote Gloria Steinem in the Los Angeles Times. Palin was, by Steinem’s lights, wrong on all the issues that mattered most to women, from the right to abortion, to funding for education, to the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which the Republican ticket opposed. If she’d thought even for a millisecond that Palin was the end product of all the battles of the 1970s, Steinem told a friend, “I’d shoot myself.”