Premenopausal Woman + White House = Disaster

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

Women Are Replaceable: Sarah Palin

I love being right.

John McCain is about to exploit something about women that, deep down, everyone knows to be true: they’re replaceable. This woman in some “Hillary supporters for Obama” group summed it up best:

Does John McCain think that women are just Lego blocks? Like he can just swap out a red one for a green one and the Hillary supporters won’t notice?

YES! He sure does! That’s the whole plan! It’s so obvious, it’s undeniable! And let me tell you something: it’s going to work. We’re talking about women here. Women are illogical and vindictive. They’re not going to look at her voting record, her NRA membership, or anything like that. Women will vote for her because she’s a woman and they’re mad at Barack for edging out a victory, end of story. Republicans are geniuses.

Now, this certainly doesn’t lock things up for McCain, but it gets him right back in the game. So here’s some advice for all you politicos out there: The election will be decided on how people feel the country is doing at the time of the election. The best predictor for this, by far, is gas prices. If gas prices are really high, people will want change and vote for Obama. If they aren’t (and things are going ok in Iraq) people will vote for McCain. It’s that simple. I’ll have my election prediction sometime in Mid-October and I won’t be wrong.

How John McCain Will Win

If you told me 3 months ago that John McCain could beat Barack Obama, I would have laughed at you. But what about picking a woman, a hot-for-44 woman, as VP: Governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin? I mean, wouldn’t all the Hillary backers jump ship and vote for McCain unless Obama picked Hillary for VP? Wouldn’t there be at least 3 ‘CATFIGHT’ headlines on the front of the New York Post every time the two took passive aggressive shots at each other? Wouldn’t it make things more interesting and take the focus off of McCain himself, which helps him out big time? The Republicans are a lot of things, but they aren’t stupid. I’m thinking the day after the Dem Convention, she’s announced as VP. That would work.