anti-environmental policies. Chapter Three, “Palintology,” features an assortment of vintage Selected Palinisms and a cross section of her lies and misrepresentations. In Chapters Four and Five—“Lipstick on a Faux Feminist: Palin and Women” and “The Palin Pageant: Sex, God, and Country First”—the cultural implications of her ascension are explored. Chapter Six takes stock of the ideology of Palinism; Chapter Seven chronicles her missteps and ultimate electoral defeat; and Chapter Eight illuminates her legacy and future in the Republican Party.
As it turned out, at the ballot box, most Americans proved they were able to see through the glossy packaging and peg Palin for what she was: a Christian fundamentalist opposed to the teaching of honest sex education in schools and in favor of teaching creationism alongside evolution, a climate-change-denier and government-basher alarmingly ignorant of the world and totally unprepared to be president. Women voted overwhelmingly for Obama—56 percent to 43 percent for McCain/Palin—while men were about evenly split. Exit surveys showed that Palin was a drag on the Republican ticket.
But as we’ve seen, this is a woman with at least nine lives. By our count, having crashed and burned in Election 2008 and resigned ignominiously as governor, she’s still got seven left.
1/ PICKING PALIN
The GOP ’s Gift to America
Beauty and the Beast
JoAnn Wypijewski
A man fiddling with his wedding ring in the presence of another woman usually has something on his mind. At his introduction of Sarah Palin to the world on August 29, John McCain appeared a man possessed, playing with his ring, fastening his gaze on her breasts, her backside, his right fingers sliding up from that dratted gold band to the finger tip, pinching it as if to control the volcano stirring within him. “Boxed up,” the young McCain once said in a near-frenzy, describing to a confidante the state of his emotions under the Naval Academy’s discipline; the expression suited his performance that Friday in Dayton, when he finally regained composure by assuming the rigid posture of attention that the academy had taught so well.
Here was McCain, the angry old warrior, deploying sex as a central political weapon to recharge his potency, his party’s fortunes, and the cultural oomph of the right. Not gender. The Republicans didn’t need just any woman to compete with Obama for the Wow factor, the Mmm factor, the stable, loving family factor. It is a calculated bonus that adherents can now speak loftily of making history, but for different reasons, drawing deep from the well of their identities, and not for the first time, both McCain and the right needed a sexual icon.
McCain’s first wife, Carol, airbrushed from his “compelling story” even when her three children trooped onstage to complete the convention’s family tableau, was a swimsuit model. Tall and slender when she saw John off to Vietnam, she was five inches shorter when he returned, broken grievously from a car accident, using a catheter and a wheelchair. “I don’t look so good myself,” he told her; privately he told friends the sight of her “appalled” him. He began looking for a more alluring replacement almost immediately. Carol says she has “no bitterness,” according to a story by Sharon Churcher in the London Daily Mail . John just “wanted to be 25 again.”
At forty-two McNasty, as he was called in high school, took up with twenty-four-year-old Cindy, a former junior rodeo queen, and, having boosted his image and his net worth via a marriage vow, soon reverted to the pattern of insults and macho egotism that has typified most of his life. He denigrated her education at U.S.C. as a tour through “the University of Spoiled Children.” For all but one of several miscarriages, he left her on her own. When she was popping ten to fifteen pills a day to mask her pain and “do everything he wanted,” he never noticed. In
As it turned out, at the ballot box, most Americans proved they were able to see through the glossy packaging and peg Palin for what she was: a Christian fundamentalist opposed to the teaching of honest sex education in schools and in favor of teaching creationism alongside evolution, a climate-change-denier and government-basher alarmingly ignorant of the world and totally unprepared to be president. Women voted overwhelmingly for Obama—56 percent to 43 percent for McCain/Palin—while men were about evenly split. Exit surveys showed that Palin was a drag on the Republican ticket.
But as we’ve seen, this is a woman with at least nine lives. By our count, having crashed and burned in Election 2008 and resigned ignominiously as governor, she’s still got seven left.
1/ PICKING PALIN
The GOP ’s Gift to America
Beauty and the Beast
JoAnn Wypijewski
A man fiddling with his wedding ring in the presence of another woman usually has something on his mind. At his introduction of Sarah Palin to the world on August 29, John McCain appeared a man possessed, playing with his ring, fastening his gaze on her breasts, her backside, his right fingers sliding up from that dratted gold band to the finger tip, pinching it as if to control the volcano stirring within him. “Boxed up,” the young McCain once said in a near-frenzy, describing to a confidante the state of his emotions under the Naval Academy’s discipline; the expression suited his performance that Friday in Dayton, when he finally regained composure by assuming the rigid posture of attention that the academy had taught so well.
Here was McCain, the angry old warrior, deploying sex as a central political weapon to recharge his potency, his party’s fortunes, and the cultural oomph of the right. Not gender. The Republicans didn’t need just any woman to compete with Obama for the Wow factor, the Mmm factor, the stable, loving family factor. It is a calculated bonus that adherents can now speak loftily of making history, but for different reasons, drawing deep from the well of their identities, and not for the first time, both McCain and the right needed a sexual icon.
McCain’s first wife, Carol, airbrushed from his “compelling story” even when her three children trooped onstage to complete the convention’s family tableau, was a swimsuit model. Tall and slender when she saw John off to Vietnam, she was five inches shorter when he returned, broken grievously from a car accident, using a catheter and a wheelchair. “I don’t look so good myself,” he told her; privately he told friends the sight of her “appalled” him. He began looking for a more alluring replacement almost immediately. Carol says she has “no bitterness,” according to a story by Sharon Churcher in the London Daily Mail . John just “wanted to be 25 again.”
At forty-two McNasty, as he was called in high school, took up with twenty-four-year-old Cindy, a former junior rodeo queen, and, having boosted his image and his net worth via a marriage vow, soon reverted to the pattern of insults and macho egotism that has typified most of his life. He denigrated her education at U.S.C. as a tour through “the University of Spoiled Children.” For all but one of several miscarriages, he left her on her own. When she was popping ten to fifteen pills a day to mask her pain and “do everything he wanted,” he never noticed. In
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