Palin provides a striking alternative

VP pick defies archetypes of women in politics

Governor Sarah Palin of Alaska, John McCain's choice for vice presidential candidate, and former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney campaigned yesterday in O'Fallon, Mo. (John Gress/ Reuters)

ST. PAUL - She hunts. She fishes. She was a beauty queen and star high-school athlete. She is the mother of five and a popular governor, but the thought of having to choose between work and family appears to have never crossed her mind. She firmly opposes abortion, and both she and her 17-year-old daughter chose to keep their babies under challenging circumstances.

Sarah Palin, the Republican governor of Alaska and John McCain's unexpected choice for vice president, represents a striking alternative to the female archetypes that have long dominated American politics. She is a sharp departure from traditional Republican wives such as librarian Laura Bush and heiress Cindy McCain, but she is also very different from the Democrats' pair of urbane working mothers, Hillary Clinton and Michelle Obama, who are strongly identified with the pro-abortion rights feminist movement.

For some conservative women, Palin's sudden arrival at the pinnacle of American politics is both welcome and long overdue.

"It's so great to have a strong female role model," said Emily Zanotti, a 26-year-old conservative political strategist from Chicago who writes the political blog American Princess. "We don't really belong anywhere, women like me. In the Republican Party we're not really welcomed because we don't fit the traditional model, and we're not welcomed by the Democrats because we're pro-life."

What political impact Palin may have on the race is hard to predict. A poll released yesterday found that Palin was less popular among women than men. In interviews at the Minnesota State Fair the other day, several women, including some who favored Hillary Clinton in the primary, said it was unlikely they would vote McCain-Palin, even if they were intrigued by Palin's biography, or who saw McCain's choice as a cynical attempt to appeal to women by picking a running mate for her gender.

"I feel like she's kind of a pawn," said Connie Brekken, a 52-year-old executive assistant and undeclared voter from Minneapolis. "I sort of felt sorry for her, in a way . . . almost embarrassed for her."

But for many Republicans and right-leaning independents, Palin's arrival comes almost as a relief. For them, Palin's biography and lifestyle reflect aspects of their own lives rarely seen among women on the national stage.

Some are women from rural states where hunting and fishing are as much women's pastimes as men's, and who have hungered to see a woman on the national political stage who understands that. Deanna Wallace, an 18-year-old college student and alternative Republican convention delegate from Shreveport, La., a "huge tomboy" growing up, loves football and got a gun for her 13th birthday. She identifies strongly with Palin, who earned the nickname "Sarah Barracuda" on the high school basketball court and is a lifetime member of the NRA.

"I think people have the idea of Southern belles for so long, and we're tired of it," Wallace said. "We want to be strong women in our own right, not what society expects of women."

And after decades of hearing women who favor abortion rights argue that the male-dominated Republican Party could not possibly understand the plight of women facing an unwanted pregnancy and have no business regulating abortion, women who oppose abortion say Palin is a living validation of their point of view.

"I think abortion, in the end, comes down to being a woman's issue, and I think you really need women to talk about it because women are the ones who are affected by it," said Zanotti, who added that the news yesterday of Palin's 17-year-old daughter's pregnancy ought to only strengthen that message. "It's a brave decision, and I think it says a lot about her family."

Many Republican women also love the size of Palin's family and the seeming ease with which she integrated her career and family life. (A feat, her critics would say, made easier by her pursuit of a political career in a tiny state population-wise with far less competition for top political jobs than most other states.) Few of the country's most prominent political women - with the exception of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who has five children - have such big families.

Sandy McDade, a Louisiana delegate who raised six children and took care of more than two dozen foster children before opening her own business as a political consultant and call center owner, calls Palin "my rock star." She sees someone like herself in Palin - a woman who never questioned the credo that "children are my life," but who cheerfully found a way to buy groceries, carpool, and have a successful career.

"She's not what we're always criticized for being - we're criticized for being country club women," she said. "The walk she's taken has been just like mine."

But if Palin seems more down to earth than other female political icons in some ways, in others, she is a more exotic figure. The Alaskan elements of Palin's biography have helped turn her into a kind of female conservative superhero: She doesn't just support gun rights, she hunts moose; she is not just a working mother but one who feeds her kids caribou hot dogs; she married her high school sweetheart who also happens to be a world champion snow-machine racer.

A right-wing blogger this week posted side-by-side photos of Obama on a bike wearing a helmet and Palin sitting on a Harley Davidson motorcycle, observed Ralph Whitehead, a journalism professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

"There are parts of her that are out of the American mainstream, and parts of her that are much more squarely planted within it than either the country club women or the feminist champions," Whitehead said. "What the electoral consequences of her biography will prove to be obviously remains to be seen," he added.