William Kristol pens an op-ed piece for the New York Times that offers the best bird’s-eye view of this strange election season I’ve read so far. He calls the choices facing voters this year a “God, guns and lipstick” election. You’re either for it or against it, take your choice and vote on it. The good news is that 2008 has been a thoroughly refreshing year. After two decades of Bush and Clinton and Bush presidencies, we’re getting change.
On the Democratic side, the Clinton machine supposedly couldn’t be beaten. It was. In the first real upset in either party’s nominating process in a long time, first-term senator Barack Obama mobilized new voters, volunteers and donors in a way that hadn’t been thought possible, and defeated Hillary Clinton.
Meanwhile, the Republican Party — which had nominated a Bush for president or vice president in six of the last seven elections — chose as its nominee a troublemaker who was George W. Bush’s main challenger in 2000 and his sharp critic for much of his administration. John McCain wasn’t on particularly good terms with either the G.O.P. establishment or the leaders of the conservative movement — yet he won. He then put on a Republican convention that barely acknowledged the existence of the current Republican administration.
And he chose as his running mate Sarah Palin, one of the least-known outsiders to be picked in modern times, and the first woman on a Republican ticket. This in turn sent other establishments into a frenzy.
Kristol explains why McCain’s Palin pick has created such “frenzies” in not only political establishments but also media, academics and feminists.
Is 2008 just a strange year, or is something big happening? Are we seeing one of America’s periodic political and cultural awakenings, one of our occasional, almost-convulsive democratic reactions to what is felt to be too great a distance between the people and their “establishments”? Such awakenings can be sudden and can come at once from different directions. They often have a theme in common, which is an indignant popular demand: “Stop speaking for us and start listening to us.”
We’re gonna get change, no matter which party wins control of the White House and Congress. Question is, which kind of change will we get?
We’re either going to make a sharp left turn toward socialism and bigger government or a sharp right turn toward “God, guns and lipstick.”
These three yardsticks offer the widest possible differences of viewpoints in the two presidential campaigns. McCain-Palin’s traditional church view of God and country vs. Obama’s 20 years in not-reverend Wright’s Black Liberation Theology church and his “God D---- America!” rants.
McCain-Palin’s long record of support for the 2nd Amendment’s individual right to keep and bear arms vs. Obama and Biden’s gun-control record.
And the lipstick issue is just as stark between the two camps: women as feminists, career first, family last; or the working mom’s family first.
And believe it or else, Kristol finds agreement on Palin vs. Obama from that flaming red-headed liberal op-ed writer at the NYT, Maureen Dowd!
Sarah has single-handedly ushered out the “Sex and the City” era, and made the sexy new model for America a retro one — the glamorous Pioneer Woman, packing a gun, a baby and a Bible.
Her explosion onto the scene made Obama seem even more like a windy, wispy egghead.
Of course, Maureen really wasn’t trying to approve of anything Palin stands for or oppose anything Obama advocates, she somehow she let that pro-Palin, anti-Obama comment slip into her latest screech about how Sarah Palin threatens to bring about the end of the world as we know it.
But if Charlie Gibson can cherry-pick quotes out of context in his interview with Palin, I reserve the right to do the same with Maureen’s screech.
Maureen’s slip of the pen in her anti-Palin column is the classic definition of a political gaffe: “When a politician accidentally speaks the truth.”
Now if we could only get Maureen to read her column aloud on Youtube. That would make a great 30-second commercial for McCain-Palin.
We could call it “Pioneer Woman packing a gun, a baby and a Bible takes on the Windy, Wispy Egghead from Chicago.” Pioneer 1, Egghead 0.
Mercy, Maureen, well played! With friends like you, Obama doesn’t need any enemies. And with enemies like you, Palin needs no more friends.
But something smells sorta funny about Maureen agreeing with Bill Kristol. Is this another deep, dark plot hatched for a Hillary and Bill comeback?
I console myself with the fact that Obama/Biden wouldn't be nearly as horrendous as Clinton/Gore were. At least i kinda like the guy and his family and at least it's not Hillary. If Palin somehow got to run in 4 years or became Prez during McCain's term then I think that will diffuse much of the appeal of Hillary as a woman candidate--maybe we'd be lucky enough not to ever have to have her as Prez and her lying husband back in the WH--the worst thing of all.
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