As a Republican turned Democrat for this election, I’ve been reading the Liberal blogosphere lately (ugh). They’ve missed so many good attacks on Sarah Palin; some even question if the VP matters at all. Foolish Democrats. How about the fact that she has 5 kids and doesn’t have the time to be a mother to them? She literally has an infant with Down Syndrome and is moving towards working more hours and getting what amounts to a huge promotion. What kind of self-respecting mother would do that, seriously? She’s putting her country before her children (I think she’s expected to do that). Is that a good thing? Would her daughter have gotten pregnant if she didn’t spend so much time being Governor? (that’s a ridiculous and politically charged question, don’t bother answering it)
Personally, I don’t buy it. If she’s any kind of mother, she won’t be putting her country before her family. She’s an attractive premenopausal woman who puts her family and children before anything else. I suppose the #1 thing on her mind is showing her daughters that women can “do it”. Pretty noble, yes.
What bothers me though is certain issues. My Governor in Virginia, Tim Kaine, says that he doesn’t personally support abortion with his religious beliefs, but he doesn’t think government has a place to ban it. There’s a certain separation that men and postmenopausal women can have from their personal beliefs and the laws that should be enacted by the government. This idea makes sense when you represent a diverse group of people with a wide variety of beliefs, like the citizens of the United States for example.
However, this logic doesn’t play with premenopausal women who are walking targets for the type of fear-mongering that strikes deep into the heart of the female emotional psyche. To them, nothing but their issues matter. I’m pretty sure if it doesn’t directly affect Sarah Palin, it doesn’t matter to Sarah Palin (or any other young mother for that matter). The marriage gap is a very, very related concept that illustrates this point perfectly. The party affiliation gap between married and single women is an astonishing 25-35% (depending on how the data is gathered), with married women on the Republican side of that gap. This is precisely because single women care about helping everyone and married women care about nobody outside of their own family.
“The marriage gap is one of the most important cleavages in electoral politics. The marriage gap is a defining dynamic in today’s politics, eclipsing the gender gap, with marital status a significant predictor of the vote, independent of the effects of age, race, income, education or gender.” – Stan Greenberg
DC Hero To The Rescue 
“the most important cleavages in electoral politics.”
I laughed
i don’t need to read the post, to know what this is saying. so let me just say this, it’s not easy being premenopausal, especially when you know you’re not how you usually are. but that doesn’t mean it can’t be dealt with effectively. this goes for many other conditions also synonymous with “crazy.” but you would have no idea.
Personaly I can’t care about children. ‘Cause they’re half a man’s, which makes them (both man and child) parasites. I don’t need parasites. I gave one of mine away and had a couple of others removed. No sentiments. Men should wear rubbers. If they refuse, they can cry all they want but I will have their parasite removed.
I could’t care less about moralistic opinions of spermsellers. Big smelly FART in the faces of male moralistst! Do you honestly think children are CUTE?! Let’s see if you think of them as cute is YOU had to take care of them all the time. If those kiddies are so “precious” to you men, why don’t YOU reorganize your carreers and take care of your offspring?
Children are in the way of my personal destiny in life. I hate the thougth of raising half his genes for free while I could reach personal fulfillment in stead (and that is NOT caring for parasites)! Probably Palin feels the same. Heartless? Well, what are you going to do about it? Put her in jail? Ha ha ha.
How DARE you question if Sarah Palin has enough time to be a mother and the Vice President? How DARE you?! When have you ever asked that question of a man?! When? WHEN? WHEN?!!!!!?!?
You know what Rudy, I was wrong. I like that chick. I won’t criticize her again.
I just find it rather irresponsible that a woman (as studies do show that woman are more successful in raising children) would have 5 children and not make anytime to participate in raising them…
Indeed..when men as a gender gain the patience and discipline required to raise children I will stop with this double standard…until then i won’t hear anything of it.
1. “Tim Kaine says that he doesn’t personally support abortion with his religious beliefs, but he doesn’t think government has a place to ban it.” This is exactly the stance that pussy, John Kerry, took in 2004 and it’s the same stance that so many democrats take on abortion so they can’t be accused of being baby murders while simultaneously happily taking votes from people who agree that abortion is OK.
Some people are pro-life, some are pro-choice. If Tim Kaine is “personally” pro-life, he has no business running on a pro-choice platform because he is lying to himself and to everyone else.
We live in a representative democracy. I vote for people whose beliefs on issues match my own, and I expect once they are in office they will represent the beliefs they espoused during the campaign. The biggest flaw any politician can have is maintaining one set of personal beliefs and then attempting to represent a set of beliefs that he believes are popular even when they contradict what he personally believes. There are two major reasons for this. First, as you pointed out a few posts below, real men don’t like to be untrue to themselves, so a politician like Tim Kaine who does so either suffers whenever he votes in favor of abortion or it doesn’t affect him. Neither is healthy. The second reason is that it makes the politician’s motives clear: he or she is more interested in being elected than actually representing people. These are the kind of politicians (like Bill Clinton) who get elected on whatever platform he needs to use during the election to satisfy the majority of states, but then has absolutely no hesitation to change his platforms entirely whenever the latest national issues poll comes out. Whatever it takes to stay President, because that’s what they really want.
That’s why people like George Bush and reelected him even when, in 2004, things overseas were looking far more grim than they are today. The democrats thought they had that one in the bag and they blew it. They blew it because Kerry was one of these phony Tim Kaine/Bill Clinton/Barack Obama politicans who wanted to be president first and then formulate positions later. Bush, even though not everything he did was right, is governing by his own personal beliefs. Enough people saw value in those beliefs, and the fact that he governs this way, that he was reelected.
And this is exactly why Sarah Palin is popular. She is not fake. She is not running as a vice president, she is running as Sarah Palin. People respect that. It’s the exact opposite of what people mean when they say “politics as usual” or “washington insider.
2. Everyone is selfish. Single women don’t care about anyone else, they care about themselves. Electing a democratic president as an abstract stand-in for the provider that married women already have is the reason for the marriage gap. Fear mongering works on mothers, but I wish the elitist pseudo-intellectual democrats would stop talking about maternal instincts as character flaws. Those instincts took a few million years to develop. They are tried and true. We’re both here because our mothers had them. Social policies that the democrats put in place only a mere 70 years ago are already spectacularly failing while maternal instincts have worked since the dawn of time. Which do you think has more value? Of course, anything instinctual is bad and everything intellectual is good, so of course it’s our duty to rise above our primal behaviors, right?
Wrong. I don’t have to explain that to you, you know all about it. You play on those primal behaviors every time you game a girl, but yet when it comes to politics, those primal behaviors are worthless? You should know – there’s no changing instincts – whether in a bar in DC or in the majority of American households.
Well put, Evan. +1 CP.
I guess the real issue I have is whether the Presidency is still the head of a representative democracy or if it has morphed into something much closer to a CEO of a large corporation. Personally, I see it as the latter because of the financial responsibilities and complex decisions that come with the job, but one could easily argue that this isn’t in line with the original intent of the Presidency.
In other words, I think America is both too large and too diverse to elect a president to represents “our” beliefs and values and instead is better off electing someone who can walk whatever path the situation dictates.
That’s a well made point dehero…I can’t think of better grounds to elect a president on other than his ability to adapt to certian situations.
On your other point, the president today has way too much power, and though the position has been on the rise of power over the last couple centuries of our nations establishment is seems that over the last 8 or so years ecspecially the positions stature of power has started to get out of hand.