This is two-thirds of a short thing in Kaplan about Sarah Palin last night:
1) She’s lost a lot of weight, perhaps 15 pounds. She looked trim and firm, like she’s hoisting the barbells or maybe chopping wood. Her chair at the head table was empty; if she had the shrimp and filet mignon served to attendees, she ate in her hotel room.
2) She wore a fitted black suit, black hose and high black platform heels. She had on three opera-length strands of pearls, two white and one multi-colored. In her lapel, a small pin with two flags — for Israel and the United States.
This isn’t that Robin Givens, or whatever her name is, queer eye for politicians’ wives thing, this is from a blog that purports to be about politics.
We did hear a lot about Al Gore’s weight and beard and so on, so I can’t honestly say for sure that a man wouldn’t be scrutinized in the same way.
SpotWeld
I’d give this a pass for the most part.
It’s surface observational stuff that can be said to “Set the scene”.
It’s not someone gushing about how she winked, or pointing out how great it is to have a “Sexy woman” to look it.
It sort of shades in that direction a little, but as you pointed out it’s comparable to the initial rundown you get on a lot of politicians in these video-media-centric days.
ulee
Sarah is not aging well. She is getting the face she deserves.
licensed to kill time
__
I think that was spoze to be “Her head at the chair table was empty”…
(Really, this reminds me of really old school reporting, when they always described what women wore in great detail because that was about all they were allowed to contribute.)
ETA – I am now searching my post for hidden words as it seems to be in moderation, OMG!
Interrobang
I vote for “all of the above.” Sexism is usually stupid, and until male politicians habitually get gushing or hypercritical coverage of their looks in the press, that is definitely sexist. (Those whom the patriarchy would destroy, it first feminises — remember all the attention paid to Al Gore’s sweaters?)
Maude
Stupid
JGabriel
Is this a poll? I vote:
Stupid.
.
Royston Vasey
3) She was animated and full of energy, so much so that she kept knocking her microphone with her hand as she made her points. Hope the Texans are ready for her when she campaigns Sunday for Gov. Rick Perry. She certainly looks like a woman who has some plans.
JGabriel
@Interrobang: Yes, but it’s not just Al Gore who is subject to media judgment on his looks. Similar analyses focusing on appearance, but favorable, have been written about John Thune and Scott Brown.
.
kay
I may be reading too much into it, but I think there was concern about how little she ate during the McCain campaign. Her hair was falling out. She lived on diet drinks and such, and followed some sort of strict low carb diet, and lost a lot of weight. That was reported when they all turned on each other, post-loss.
So I don’t know that it’s sexist so much as gossipy.
She’s not eating again, is the point, I think.
AkaDad
Sexist [ ]
Stupid [ ]
Both [x]
merl
her head was empty as well as the chair.
Derelict
I’m sure what she looks like and what she eats (and how her breath smells and how her hair smells, etc.) is of paramount concern to Rich Lowery.
Ewwwwwwwwwww!
Ailuridae
But isn’t this right at the connection of Style and Politics or am I misremembering who Ann Gerhart is?
eemom
Fuck sexist. Fuck stupid. Most importantly, fuck
(1) the Washington Post
(2) the New York Times
(3) NPR
(4) C-Span
(5) the Sunday bobblebots
(6) memeorandum
(7-Infinity) the rest of the emmessemm
for their slobbering, slathering, suckup coverage of the blathering idiocy of an idiotic woman to 600 other idiots, as a fucking MAJOR NEWS EVENT.
Fuck. Them. All.
Linda Featheringill
Aside from any concern about her health, how much she weighs is none of our business.
Speaking of health, though, are we really sure that she does not have bipolar disorder? With recurring delusions of grandeur?
I know, I know. Analysis from a distance is very dangerous. Forget what I just said. [or not]
matoko_chan
All in her hands i guess.
srsly, her hands look very post-menopausal….gramma hands.
Perhaps she should start on some Fruits Chan Dumplings?
What I RELLY don’t understand is how ANYONE thinks Palin could become president without debating Obama?
She has to write crib notes on her hands for a closed attendance speech with screened media.
Martin
I don’t know why these sites don’t just have a starburst meter on the page for each of her appearances, with a wet noodle at the low end and a firework shot at the other.
matt
http://althouse.blogspot.com/2010/02/birthers-ought-to-worry-about-sarah.html
Check out Althouse’s rage over Sarah Sunshine wearing the israeli pin.
wasabi gasp
Dumbbells, they’re fucking dumbbells.
Mark S.
Um, she was on Hannity a week ago, and might have been on TV since then for all I know. If she is sitting in a studio instead of standing at a podium is she not “live and in person?”
Bruce (formerly Steve S.)
Sexist. I don’t think I was imagining it when I noticed W’s hair periodically getting darker, though you’d never catch the media commenting on it. But the Barracuda, Hillary, and all First Ladies are in bounds.
balconesfault
So does the first dude really send Sarah out to chop the wood for him?
Or was that some kind of euphamism?
Warren Terra
The WaPo’s focus is odd. Still, the Rapture Now pin bothers me, especially as a Jew. I’m very afraid of these nuts teaming up with Likudniks, who don’t want peace, because the wingers want Armageddon.
Chyron HR
You liberal elitists will never get it. Sarah comes from the people, and they need to adore her. So Christian Dior her, from her head to her toes. She needs to be dazzling, she wants to be rainbow high. The teabaggers need that escape, and so does she also, too.
aimai
Interrobang was just using gore as an example. I think Interrobang would probably have included every other Democratic politician in the mix as well. I’m thinking of Gore (loved his wife too much), Edwards (loved his hair too much), even Obama (too skinny and meterosexual, has a scary black wife).
They didn’t try to feminize Clinton, because he was frighteningly potent compared to the crop of Republicans with whom he competed, but they definitely tried to attack him using images of class, age, childishness, and uncontrollable consumption as ways of linking him with subordinate “types”–fat boys, unatheletic boys, snackers, women, non whites. Maybe I’m collapsing too much into one sentence but I well remember the ways in which his tubbiness and his appearance in shorts as well as his “gargantuan” and outsize appetites for food, women, talking to people were all parodied and attacked as signs of a democratic lack of discipline, distance, noblesse. Clinton was sixties excess personified, and always contrasted with the imaginary Ronald and Bush senior who were (at least in media representations if not always in popular conservative circles) seen as upright elder statesmen. Manly and reticent.
aimai
kay
@eemom:
Stick with it. Eventually, she has to actually run and win. They can try to sell her from now to election day, but she still has to do that.
If I get a choice, I want her as the opponent.
Too, eemom, there is going to be hell to pay, for Republicans, if she isn’t the nominee.
If the media keep this up she’s the presumptive. Her fans will go berserk if that’s “taken” from her.
I think this is a good longer-term thing for us.
CalD
When a man dresses well he’s a homo. Ask the Breck Girl, or his metro-sexual running mate.
Mark S.
@matt:
Shorter Ann Althouse:
I’ve never tried box wine for breakfast.
matt
@Mark S.:
<3
I love this :
JGabriel
matoko_chan:
Remember, these are people who think Palin won her debate with Joe Biden.
And they honestly think Palin would win a debate against Obama. In their minds, she would.
Scary minds?
.
Warren Terra
@matt
Needless to say, after briefly criticizng the pin Althouse pivots and most of her post is about how Obama – and his dead mom, for FSM’s sake – don’t love America.
kay
@Mark S.:
I play a game with Ann Althouse.
“Find the factual inaccuracy”. Usually, it’s in the first or second paragraph, which saves me time. Here, she repeats the untruth that Obama doesn’t honor the flag. That’s simply not true.
I’m not reading a lazy law professor. If she can’t get simple facts right, and she can’t, no one should rely on anything she says.
She’s sloppy. I feel for her students. It must be crazy-making.
C Nelson Reilly
Please – no pearl necklace jokes.
JGabriel
@matoko_chan:
You should see the paintings in her attic. Well, crayola drawings, but you get the point.
.
demkat620
@ulee: I was just going to say that. The meaness is starting to draw lines on her face and it ain’t pretty.
matt
Althouse really confuses me, because I went to law school, and none of my professors would ever make the fallacious arguments she does. If they did we would have ridiculed them to no end.
Even the super creepy federalist society people were far sharper than this “thing”.
Martin
@matoko_chan: Debates are negotiated between the candidates. She’d agree to no more than one – and probably only a town hall. Obama would ask for one every day, open-ended, with a moderator only to keep them in the time limits and free popcorn for the audience.
matt
We used to joke that George W. Bush had a habit of failing upwards.
It’s Sarah Palin’s ethos.
Max
When do we start talking football?
It seems like it’s All Sarah Sunday.
kay
@matt:
I love how she started with the “allegiance to one flag” and ended up at Obama’s mother’s marriages.
If she were my professor, I would go insane.
There’s Point A, you’re looking for Point B, and then we’re off to the races, into “completely unrelated and insane”.
I hope she drinks. If she doesn’t, well, she’s nuts.
Jim C
That sets off my Reagan Ringtone.
General Winfield Stuck
LOL.
freelancer
Well, not to defend Kaplan, DougJ, but they can’t exactly speak to her policy initiatives without inviting reference to the telepalmer, or the fact that she has no specifics.
McCain picked her because she was a woman. During her acceptance speech, he kept staring at her ass. She is nothing but window dressing, and her ideas are a mile wide, but a nanometer deep. There’s no ‘there’ there, and what we’ve learned about this woman in the interim has been nothing short of laughably heart-stopping.
2012 will be Black Spock vs. Gov. Ritchie
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qIy0AP1Sbrk
Ash Can
Actually, I think there’s a certain appropriateness to describing how Palin looked and what she was wearing. Her appeal is and always has been primarily superficial, after all, so why not report on her appearance? It’s all part of the same narrative.
And why shouldn’t she wear an Israeli flag pin? Heck, any day now, Jewish people will be flocking to Israel. She’s just showing the world that she’s Armageddon-ready.
jeffreyw
@Max:
Watch it, bub…
Davis X. Machina
Meaner than Nixon, dumber than Bush II. The perfect GOP storm…..
calipygian
Actually, I’m kind of interested that she wore two flag pins, putting the flag of a foreign power on the same level with the American flag.
Brachiator
@kay:
Bingo!
Also, too, part of what sells Palin is her sex appeal. How could anyone avoid one of Palin’s initial selling points and the primary reason for her continued political existence?
Max
Obama’s on my teevee talking about healthcare, which is weird because the puma’s and Jane Hamshers of the left tell me he doesn’t care about healthcare and has moved on because Rahm is making him.
/obot
General Winfield Stuck
@Max: Ok, max, how much you got down on this game?
Ash
@matt: I scrolled to a random spot in the comments of that Althouse thing, saw someone reference Obama as a “jive-turkey,” and felt like stabbing myself.
demo woman
@Max: His hands are clean!
General Winfield Stuck
@Max:
Well, Obama should have made Lieberman stand nekked on the WH lawn till he coughed up the sixtieth vote. Barrack the Slacker dude.
I just probly gave myself a nightmare for tonight./
Church Lady
You must have forgotten the crease in Obama’s pants that made David Brooks see starbursts.
aimai
Holy jumped up lunacy:
Althouse is stark, raving, mad. How on earth can any normal person think that Obama’s mother’s marital choices, or the fact that as a young child he had to live wherever his parent placed him, be any kind of evidence of a “lack of devotion” to America? I often feel, reading Althouse, that I’m listening to a person who has no real mooring in reality. But this takes the cake. She ought to be disbarred for it–not because I don’t like what she thinks or says but because she can’t possibly be trusted to teach actual law to actual law students, can she? This line of reasoning will lead them to be unable to defend clients. Hell, if they follow her down the rabbit hole they may be unable even to recognize the doorknob and get out of their offices to get to court.
aimai
Napoleon
@matt:
And she isn’t the only law prof. blogging on politics that makes a lot of fallacious arguments.
Max
@General Winfield Stuck: No money. Just going to enjoy. I’m an AFC girl, but wouldn’t mind the Saints winning. First time in a long time that I haven’t hated one of the teams playing.. cough. Patriots. cough.
I’m a little spunky, as the big giant cup of very strong coffee finally got rid of a headache I’ve had for hours. I love caffine. Nature’s hillbilly heroin.
And who are you cheering for?
ruemara
Oh Doug, why can’t it be both? As if men can’t multitask.
General Winfield Stuck
@Max: Neither, don’t have any feelings one way or the other about either team. I will likely do what LauraW does in these situations and pick the team with the nicest uniforms.
Let’s see if I can hook me a Krazy Kale lady with this cast.:)
demo woman
A friends brother who lives outside Indianapolis is wearing his Brees jersey while cheering for the Colts. Long time Purdue fans and Indiana residents must be conflicted.
Ash Can
@Church Lady: I thought it was the GOP senator’s hand on his thigh.
@aimai:
I wonder the same thing, time and again. If my law professor had some weird-ass hobby that involved opinions I disagreed with, big deal, as long as that professor did a decent job in the classroom. But if that hobby indicated that said professor’s thought process worked in a way inconsistent with the logic and rigor of thought necessary to impart knowledge, increase understanding, and sharpen analysis of the law and attendant issues? I’d run, not walk, to the registrar’s office to change my class.
Crazy Kale Lady
@General Winfield Stuck: Snort.
Mike in NC
Palin really is a performance artist without peer. What are the odds she’ll parachute into the stadium during the Superbowl halftime show, deliver a peptalk about “lifting America’s spirits”, and finish up by having a wardrobe malfunction?
eric k
demo woman,
I had completely forgotten the Purdue angle (and I’m a UW fan who was at the Rose Bowl when we beat Brees)
That is an interesting curiosity, both QBs having ties to the other town.
Skepticat
There’s a difference?
Dannie22
Where does Althouse teach?
General Winfield Stuck
@Dannie22:
Whatsamatta U at Frostbite Falls.
aimai
In re Althouse, I think I only pretend to be surprised. Actually, she and McCardle both remind me of the Buffy the Vampire ep. where Buffy can hear people’s thoughts. Althouse doesn’t seem to have any kind of filter between her thoughts, which are perhaps no stupider or more confused than those of other people, or hamsters, and what pops off the keyboard. She reminds me of “Cordelia” in that way. Buffy looks around the room and hears what everyone is thinking, and everyone is thinking something integral to their own positions/histories/ideas and Cordelia is thinking “what does this have to do with me?” and then she looks up and simply blurts out the same thing. There’s no difference between the inner and outer.
aimai
Joey Maloney
@JGabriel:
And should it come to pass they will remain unshakeably convinced she won, even if she widdles herself onstage.
Martin
@Dannie22: U Wisc. They’re a top 40 law school. I think US News should penalize schools in the rankings for showing such poor judgement.
Someone had to say it
@Napoleon:
Heh. Indeed.
The Republic of Stupidity
Why the false dichotomy?
Why can’t it be both sexist AND stupid at the same time?
IM
This made me actually angry. And things on the internet don’t make me angry and I am only a somewhat detached observer of american politics and I really don’t expect much of Althouse.
But this angered me. How dares this little punk judge the loves and marriages of other people?
maus
Conservatives: “HA HA BLACKS CALL THEMSELVES ‘AFRICAN AMERICANS’ ”
{salutes the flag of israel}
silentbeep
Um no DougJ. While all people, regardless of gender, are scrutinized to a certain degree on their looks, the heavier burden of looksism is carried by women. This is still the case even with the rise and fall of the metrosexual, even though we have publications such as Men’s Health that push the message that men need to look a certain way. I’m not denying that there isn’t any pressure for men to “look good” in whatever meainstream cultural standard that means, it’s just that the cultural expectations to be attractive, no matter what, are so much highe for women.
However: there is no way in hell a woman would have the career that the governer of New Jersey now has, or that John Travolta now has or Rush Limbaugh now has, with the huge weight gains, weight-loss, re-weight gains and so on. Oprah is the lone exception and she got villified for being fat.
zoe kentucky in pittsburgh
I think the truly bizarro sexist thing is that if Palin were an ugly or ordinary looking woman none of us would know who she is. She’s a political pin-up girl, the Paris Hilton of politics, she’s Ann Coulter with a lot less brains or education. The winking, the excessive flirtation, she is one of those women whose entire existence depends on her sex appeal and how she uses it to garner attention. For pete’s sake, she was a beauty pagent winner who placed 3rd in a bid for Miss Alaska! What kind of woman does that kind of thing? Really smart women or women who just love being the center of attention for their looks?
I think even Palin might know she was chosen as VP because she looked the part, as we all know now they did nothing to check and see if she could actually play the part or if there was anything in her pretty little head other than a monster ego and endless guile.
thomas Levenson
@aimai: I think you give both McArdle and Althouse too much credit, or everyone else too little. It’s not that they have some self-destructive candor that removes their ability to filter their BS. It is that things they value in their lives — position, celebrity/notoriety, money — turn on maintaining a particular position that also requires them to say lots of risible things. They may have reached the point where they’ve said them enough to believe them and or they may have been young and stupid to say them back then (and all of us, or at least me, has plenty of Y + S to recall, after all). But there’s this difference between the Althouse’s of the world and people who actually like to know things. After a while you get in the habit of testing your Y + S BS against reality, and when it doesn’t match up, you think on why that might be so…and so on.
But when it is convenient, even important, to be seen as a brave contrarian, even if it means you have to say stuff over and over again you were once smart enough to have had at least a chance of seeing through…then you will yourself dumb and stay that way.
zoe kentucky in pittsburgh
As for the American and Israeli flag thing– nothing creeps me out more than the right-wing supposed love of Israel. Makes me want to smack around any of my fellow Jews who fall for their schtick. Hello??!?? The only reason they give a shit about Jews in Israel is because of what is says in Revelations– that Jews need to be there in order to die en masse so that Jesus can come back. We’re merely pawns in their elaborate doomsday religious mythology.
Mark S.
@IM:
This angered me too. She actually ended up being more offensive than the birthers who she mocks in the beginning.
Mo's Bike Shop
Feh. There’s a tolerance level for botox.
DonkeyKong
“She’s got a GREAT ASS! and your head is all the way up it!”- Al Pacino in Heat who might as well be addressing the Post.
Loon Juice
my new name above for the rare occasion when I post in here, it was suggested to me by my computer when I typed faster than my computer was ready for. I think it might be the perfect name for a conservative alter ego blog for Balloon Juice.
Firm seems to me to be an odd word to use to describe a political figure, that tells me that this was a little more than only a discussion of the physical attributes of such a person. Has there ever been a man described as firm and is firm used to describe anything beyond breasts or buttocks (or am I way off base here and I look at too much porn?)? Same with the reference to her “hose.” (Sarah has a hose?) It would be like decribing the socks Obama wore to the State of the Union and that would be weird.
The flag thing is scary, I think her flag pin is her secret message to the religious whackos that she’s with them.
jenniebee
I had a friend in college who used to drink boone’s wine through a straw to establish a “base” before she headed to frat parties. She wore tight skirts and tight v-neck sweaters that showed off her large tracts of land to these parties, and she routinely complained mightily after them about the unwanted attention she got while she was there. Nothing ever happened beyond flirtation, but she had a boyfriend back home and was affronted by the flirtation. If I pointed out that she was going to frat parties pre-drunk and falling out of her shirt, and told her that she was signalling like mad that she wanted to be hit on, she would ask if I’d say the same to someone who’d been raped?
Sarah Palin is much the same as my friend in college. She wants both to reap the advantages that can come from an overt sexual appeal, but also to forbid anyone else from pointing out that that’s what she’s doing when she wears a shirt open to her navel to a frat party or Naughty Monkey peekabo shoes to a Vice Presidential debate. Palin is attempting to evoke the “starbursts” response while relying on feminist political correctness to muffle voices that wish to point out that her sexual tactics are better suited to a campaign for homecoming queen than for an actual office of responsibility.
When you hear women say about Palin that their first impression of her was that she was one of “those” kinds of women, this is what we meant. There are women who get through life by gaming the men around them and initimidating the women who notice, and Sarah Palin is the ultimate success story for that strategy. But the women who employ that strategy are without exception destructive as hell to the people they’re gaming. This kind of coverage, treating women who are trading on their sex appeal for power, this is the only appropriate response to that kind of woman. Maybe someday we’ll be beyond this kind of gender politics and this kind of coverage will be beyond the pale, but today is not that day.