Whee – Me!

The sheer depth of the scorn heaped upon Hillary Clinton when she and Bill lived in the White House not only puzzled me, it fairly scared me as well. Hillary was – and may still be – the most despised person in the United States. For all the rumor, innuendo, canard, and outright fiction generated about her, a visitor from another planet might be excused for concluding that Hillary Rodham Clinton is a lesbian, a murderer, a swindler, and the mother of a gargoyle.

Hillary and Friend

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For reasons that escape me to this day, Hillary inspired a visceral reaction in the Republican faithful. I’ve talked to quite a few people who, when her name is mentioned, seem to suffer a gag reflex. This abhorrence is too deep to be plumbed by mere rational conversation. In the absence of any credible justifications for the antipathy toward Hillary, I came to the conclusion that a lot of people hate her because she’s a woman who wants to be a leader.

In other words, Hillary doesn’t know her place. There are, after all, still countless troglodytes of both sexes who’d prefer women be little more than brood sows. This rationale seemed to work fine until a couple of weeks ago.

Then, on Friday, August 29th, 2008, John McCain announced that a previously unknown woman from somewhere near the Arctic Circle would be his running mate on the Republic ticket this year. Since then, Alaska governor Sarah Palin has become a celebrity. Her presence on the ticket, say the wags, has energized the Republican party. She may be, some opine, the key to victory in November.

The Life Of The Party

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Part of her spiel is that she’s a tough, effective chief executive. She has upset the Republican apple cart in Alaska, gone toe to toe with big oil interests, and told the federal government what it could do with its $27 million dollar “Bridge to Nowhere.” I’m not going to quibble with the veracity of these claims. This is politics, after all. Everybody running for office has the morals of a saint and the spine of a rhinoceros. What’s important here is that Palin is selling herself as a leader.

Apparently, Republicans now believe that leadership is indeed a fine and dandy place for women. If so, what is Hillary’s sin, then?

It’s A Gut Reaction

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You’ll learn what it is if you listen carefully to each of these women speak. Let’s start with content. When the Clintons were running for president in 1992, Hillary stated that she’d chosen not to stay at home, bake cookies and have teas but to go out and ply her profession. Much of America suffered apoplexy. Then Hillary offended the good conservatives who cherish family photo ops by adamantly excluding daughter Chelsea from campaign activities. Seemed a reasonable stance to me; she wanted to protect her kid from prying eyes while not turning her into a political prop. Republicans concluded, though, that she had no desire to be seen with, ugh, a child. Hillary, they charged, lacked maternal instincts. And then, as First Lady, rather than working tirelessly to convince America’s children to brush their teeth before bedtime, she took on the role of point person in health insurance reform. My heavens, the right howled, who does she think she is?

Who Needs Health Care Reform?

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Palin, on the other hand seems more than thrilled to crow about her status as a “hockey mom,” whatever in the hell that is. I assume it means she’s one of those stretch-pantsed, Avia-sneakered, Celine Dion-listening helicopter parents who refuse to let their kids play sports on their own or, for that matter, do anything, up to and including void their bladders, without hanging around them like a cloud of gnats. Sheesh, you think the Baby Boomers generated a lot of business for shrinks? Wait’ll you see the yachts the psychological care-givers of today’s surgically-attached-to-mom generation will be able to buy themselves.

“You’re Tearing Me Apart!”

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As for her kids, Palin couldn’t get them into the picture fast enough, a policy which stripped her pregnant teenaged daughter of any hope of privacy she may have harbored. Of course the unplanned inception is nothing to be secretive about at all, according to Republican spin. Harking back to her conservative roots (a woman’s uterus is her greatest asset), Palin gleefully announced that her daughter is going to marry the fetus’s father, a wise choice considering the many decades of wedded bliss a typical 17-year-old bride is sure to enjoy. The maternal instinct apparently runs deep in Palin’s clan.

A Woman’s Place

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So, no worries that Sarah Palin will stick her pretty little nose where it doesn’t belong. Rather than clutter up her vice-presidential office with things like reports and statute books, Palin’ll decorate it with cribs and Lego blocks. Sure she’ll be a leader – but she’ll always be a Mom.

Now let’s go past the rhetoric and listen, instead, to the sounds of the two women’s voices. Hillary Rodham Clinton speaks assertively in a rich, relatively deep, authoritarian (in the good way, not the Castro-, Saddam-way) voice. She sounds exactly like what she is: an ambitious, forceful Yale Law School-educated woman. Uh oh. Is that what god-fearing Americans want a woman to sound like?

More likely, they want a woman to sound like Sarah Palin. McCain’s running mate speaks in a gee-whiz manner that suggests she’s shocked that the big boys have actually asked her to come into their tree house. Her voice is high, almost reedy, and it breaks when she tries to stress a point. And, the piece de resistance, at key moments in her stump speech, Sarah Palin actually giggles. She sounds, in short, like a girl. Add to that the fact that she’s well-schooled in beauty contest demeanor and you have the epitome of Republican femininity.

Palin is, a large swath of America has concluded, a real woman. Not one of these health-care-reform, abortion-rights, closet lesbian, child-hating harpies. As I said earlier, the contempt for Hillary is visceral. And a huge part of it is in the voice. I think I understand now.

A woman’s place is in leadership – as long as she always remembers that she’s a girl.