Maverick Choices Leave Women Cold

When do you not want your child speaking freely? Well, when you are not sure what words will spill forth when your child is unplugged. The Republican Machine, unsure of what unchecked oratory is going to seep out before a stopper can be placed between lipsticked lips, placed restrictions on press access to Sarah Palin at the UN. Once again, a sure fire sign that she was not properly vetted. Does that matter? Not to McCain. By God he chose a woman for the women of America to have a voice.

Do I hear crickets?

Let´s put all the mudslinging and genuflecting aside for a moment and just take a good hard look at what the Republican ticket wants America to buy. In fact, let´s just get down to the bare bones of it all, woman to woman.

Sarah would never be my informed and conscious choice for President of the United States, which is what the Republicans are trying to sell should something happen to McCain. And actually, neither would Hillary.

Though I have great respect for the work Hillary Clinton has done, the things she has accomplished while in office, the policies she has driven and her commitment to public service, she just is not the one I think would make a great President at this time. She has the background, the experience and a good working knowledge--as well as a helluva lot of moxie--that makes her a viable candidate to be sure. With all her accomplishments, I hope she decides to run again at some point. Even though she is a consummate politician at this stage of her life, Hillary would at least have our backs. All of us. But this is not sour grapes here; remember, I said neither would be my first choice.

Now we have little Sarah with the grating voice and little experience. Honestly, the thought of listening to a State of the Union Address by Palin settles in my head like an unfathomable nightmare. Whenever she speaks, images of old rusted locomotives slamming into each other in the rail yard come to mind. One has trouble imagining she actually has to shoot a moose; perhaps she could just talk to it and it would gleefully fall on something sharp. If it is her voice that McCain finds titillating, why didn´t he choose Fran Drescher for God´s sake? At least we know her. And we like her.

Getting past the voice, an educated woman must have an extremely difficult time wrapping her brain around the possibility that this mousy, moose-shooting, breastfeeding, beehive-coiffed, shrill termagant could in anyway represent her and her country here, much less in the big, outside world. Add to the mix that her foreign policy experience is nil--except that purely by accident she resides within an ICBM's arc from Russia and Canada is her neighbor--oh, and she recently got a passport. We have a whopping problem.

McCain, like the rest of us, is not getting any younger. And while I do not wish the man any ill, it is entirely feasible he could become incapacitated while in office. Then little Sarah would be at the helm of our presently sinking ship. [I see a young Elizabeth Swann singing ´Yo Ho Yo Ho, A Pirate´s Life for Me´ in a fog.] What is our lipsticked hockey mom going to do then? The First Man may be tending to the sled dogs in what used to be the Rose Garden and all the unplanned blessings would be running amok on the South Lawn. While all this is going on, plus a Cold War in Russia, who is raising the children??

Obviously the abstinence lesson did not get through to the oldest one. Do not crucify me for that comment: this is woman-to-woman. Unmonitored children do not make the best choices. Period. Mom is not home much in the Palin household, and just how much responsibility is placed on dad? Palin´s nannies and housekeepers must be in place and working overtime in order to maintain her status quo as ambitious veep wannabe, and keep the Palin brood in tow. Contrary to Republican belief, from one woman to another these questions are as fair as, say, shooting moose from an aircraft.

Her brash ambition and lack of experience do not represent the opinions of any women I know--especially the lovely and up-to-date elderly, eighty-plus years foursome in the back of one of my favorite coffee haunts exploding with rage that "Palin would do nothing but set women back a hundred years". Nor does she reflect in any way the immense strides courageous women have valiantly fought for and gained, at great personal sacrifice, so that we may gain equality in the world: the right to vote, the right to choose, the right to expect equal pay for equal work, the right to certain positions that had eluded us for so long--except for her own personal gain. With the possibility of Palin at the helm, the feminist movement will slide backward faster than you can say "oink".

McCain´s rash choice of Vice Presidential Candidate Sarah Palin belies his blatantly mistaken and frankly addled assumption that women will vote for a woman first and foremost. It is a thoughtless insult he continues to peddle as his vision of changing the face of America. However, his increasingly errant behavior does oddly solidify his chosen moniker of ´maverick´; based on this choice, he has never looked more like a stray, unbranded bovine.