As the nearly two-year-old Palin piñata-fest demonstrates, for the devout liberal the intersection of Sorority Street and Politics Avenue is left-turn only.
To no one’s surprise, Sarah Palin remains the left’s First Lady of political feminae non gratae, the gold standard. The needle on the left’s Feminometer moves from the safe green left-hand side (Barbara Boxer, Nancy Pelosi) to the beige neutral middle (Olympia Snowe, Susan Collins) to the hazardous red-hued right-hand zone (Michele Bachmann) to the far-right crimson danger area (Sarah).
Palin’s status as the left’s lead whipping girl is not news. What is news is that women like Eleanor Clift (Hell hath no fury like a liberal feminist scorned) are using the same elitist Palinesque prejudices to bash this year’s crop of wrong-turning conservative women.
One of them is Linda McMahon, the Republican candidate for the Connecticut Senate seat soon to be vacated by writing-on-the-wall-peruser Chris Dodd. Here’s Clift in her May 28 column “2010 Likely to Bring a Crop of One-Term Senate Wonders:”
Another candidate who has lurched to unlikely electoral prominence is Linda McMahon, the former CEO of World Wrestling Entertainment. We don’t know enough about her yet, other than the fact that she’s prepared to spend $50 million of her own money to win a Senate race in Connecticut, where there are fewer than 2 million registered voters, a cost per capita that should break a record. Her Republican primary opponent, Rob Simmons, a Vietnam veteran, backed out of the race, saying he couldn’t compete with her money, and warning that some of the practices associated with the WWE will make voters queasy and go to McMahon’s character.
No one expects Clift (or anyone) to defend McMahon (or anyone) on the basis of shared gender. The broader matter of just what causes liberal women’s conservative misogyny is a discussion best left for another day. A very long day.
But one can expect Clift, and her liberal ilk of either gender, to refrain from the hypocrisy of attacking McMahon for spending $50 million of her own money to finance her campaign. According to Bloomberg, in the nearby state of New Jersey, Jon Corzine spent “a total of $100 million of his personal fortune” on his Senate and first gubernatorial campaigns. Let’s see now, 100 million divided by 2. Hey, whaddyaknow? That’s 50 million per campaign! The same amount that McMahon is accused of spending. Crazy.
In that 2009 gubernatorial race Chris Christie was “limited to spending $10.9 million” because he accepted public funding for his campaign. Christie attempted “to focus the campaign on corruption and the state’s financial plight.”
Where was Clift’s outrage then? Did Corzine’s gender or party affiliation, or both, shield him from the prickly swift Clift kick? Did Clift dismiss then candidate, now Governor, Christie as a man “of unlikely electoral prominence” as blithely as she does McMahon?
The Palinesque portion of the Cliftian riff on McMahon is the unsupported insinuation that “some of the practices associated with the WWE will make voters queasy and go to McMahon’s character.” In today’s liberal playbook, when attacking candidates on substance fails, you provincialize them–especially if the candidate has the ill fortune to have been born a woman. And of course, since you have no actual substance to work with, you slather on the innuendo.
With middle America–Pennsylvania and the Midwest being the proxy this time–provincialization came in the form of Obama’s April 2008 guns and Bible diatribe. Safely ensconced at a San Francisco fundraiser, Obama had his arrugula game face on when he enlightened:
You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them….So it’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.
Once again, our founders would have been the first to applaud such a humble, nonjudgmental view of the role of religion and arms in the republic they’d created.
Wrestling isn’t polo. It’s not even that Harvard swim team Richard Blumenthal never captained. But according to E*Trade, WWE, McMahon-and husband’s publicly-traded Stamford-based company, enjoys a market cap of $1.2 billion, keeps 585 people employed, and pays an 8.8% dividend to its shareholders.
The overall point of Clift’s Newsweek article, however, is not to attack McMahon per se. Linda’s just one stop on Clift’s oddly defeatist quest to find a silver lining in anticipated Democratic Senate losses in the upcoming midterms. Clift’s bizarre balm is that even if candidates of “unlikely electoral prominence” such as McMahon should win, they probably will be one-term wonders. Why? Because it happened once before in 1980. Persuaded? Me, too.
Surveying the landscape for November, Democrats should take heart. It could be a long six years, but the tide that washes in some of these outliers will be there to carry them out, just as it has in elections past.
Nevertheless, one question is begged of Clift: Throwing in the towel so soon? That’s not exactly what you’d expect from a progressive twenty-first century woman.
At least, it’s not what Sarah would do.
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