What Ellen Goodman Said

Sarah Palin gave her "Hey, Look Me Over" speech last night and apparently thrilled the faithful at the Republican National Convention. She did what she was supposed to do: lash out at the Democratic nominee, praise the Republican nominee, and explain why she was uniquely qualified to be Vice President of the United States. She also included the traditional Republican jab at the "liberal" beltway media. From today's Washington Post:

"Here's a little news flash for all those reporters and commentators," she told the convention delegates, who wagged their fingers toward the arena's media boxes as she delivered the punch line. "I'm not going to Washington to seek their good opinion -- I'm going to Washington to serve the people of this country."

While the contents of her speech were predictable, given the nature of the occasion, the circumstances leading up to the speech were pretty extraordinary. Her selection as his running mate by Sen. John McCain and the process used left the entire country's political wonks stunned. After the announcement, there were further announcements, including the admission that she had lawyered up in the face of an investigation into some "policy" decisions she made as governor of Alaska that looked remarkably like vindictiveness and the announcement that her teenage daughter was pregnant and unmarried.

Now, as to the first, there is an official investigation going on, and the Democrats would be wise to let that investigation play out. As to the second, however, there is a whole lot of cognitive dissonance going on, especially when it comes to a political party who believes it is the sole arbiter of morality and "family values," whatever in the hell that is. While I think the Democrats should tread carefully here as well, the situation Gov. Palin finds herself in is one that can be used as a pretty good gauge of exactly why the change the country wants is not going to come from the GOP ticket.

Ellen Goodman provided exactly the right analysis in her column in yesterday's Boston Globe:

Meanwhile Obama himself, the son of an 18-year-old mother, said strongly that "People's families are off-limits and people's children are especially off-limits." Well, OK. But let's not forget that it's the right wing that made social issues into a political issue. The right wing decided that pregnancy was not a matter of private decision-making but a harsh and unrelenting political battle.

Sarah Palin had her youngest child after a prenatal test showed he had Down syndrome. But she doesn't believe that other women should be allowed to make their own choice. Palin's daughter got the "news that as parents we knew would make her grow up faster than we had ever planned." But her mother opposes sex education programs that go beyond abstinence only.

McCain, an unrelenting opponent of abortion, was once asked whether the government should provide contraception and replied, "You've stumped me." The Republican platform is not similarly stumped with its implacable opposition to every abortion and its renewed "call for replacing 'family planning' programs for teens with increased funding for abstinence education, which teaches abstinence until marriage as the responsible and expected standard of behavior."

Perhaps if the country had not spent the last decade under the thumbs of the Religious Reich which demands such purity without any room for sensible sex education, Gov. Palin's daughter would not find herself in the position of having to make the choices she did. Thousands of other teens wouldn't have had to either, or have to face extensive treatment for STDs.

It's not just the hypocrisy, which is stunning in its magnitude, it's the effects of that hypocrisy on real live people, some of them too young to vote or too poor to make campaign contributions. Those effects have to be kept in mind whenever people like John McCain and Sarah Palin made their grand speeches on change.