Sarah Palin: Pity and Victimization in 2008

Sarah Palin has been a controversial figure in the political realm since she came into the national spotlight in 2008. She hadn't even served a full term as Alaska's governor when she was selected as the Republican Vice-Presidential nominee for John McCain's campaign for the election of 2008. This made many people wary of Palin, along with many other factors that the media presented during the campaign. Although Hillary Clinton was also running in this election, albeit for the Democratic nomination for President, Sarah Palin's identity as a woman was much different than Hillary's, and her family life was also different. This particular blog post will highlight how VP Nominee Sarah Palin played the victim during her campaign with John McCain.
When Palin was first announced as John McCain's running mate, the public's opinion of her went downhill fast. The Democrats honed in the idiocy of Senator John McCain for choosing someone that hadn't even completed a full term as governor, but in an interesting juxtaposition, the Republicans shot right back by zooming in on presidential candidate Senator Barack Obama's inexperience in politics. The media was also very focused on Palin's family life, as it didn't fit the social norms of American society. Palin was married, but her oldest daughter, Bristol, had become pregnant as a teenager out of wedlock, and Palin herself had a very young son with Down syndrome at the time of this campaign. The media played devil's advocate and made the public question whether or not Palin had time for both her duties and the issues of her young family (Denton 73).
Sarah Palin did not seem to take gender issues in the election as seriously as Hillary Clinton did, and displayed this when she joked that the only thing separating a hockey mom (which she considered herself to be) and a pitbull was lipstick (Denton 73). Nobody in her party threw up a red flag at this comment-they played it up as Palin being a tough, non-nonsense woman. However, the victimization role came in when Senator Obama used the following adage to attack Republican policy, "You can put lipstick on a pig. It's still a pig. You can wrap an old fish in a piece of paper. It's still gonna stink" (Denton 73). The Republican Party twisted these words into an attack on Sarah Palin's gender, and she ran with it.
The senior adviser to McCain's campaign, Carly Fiorina, described Obama's comments as evidence of his chauvinism and stated that he had belittled Palin as a woman by alluding to the fact that she was not competent for the job of Vice-President. Massachusetts Governor Jane Swift also played on feminist sympathies by stating that "Palin had been the target of an outrageous smear campaign" (Eilperin, 2008). Denton also points out that McCain himself had used the same "pig" analogy that Obama had in order to describe Obama and Hillary Clinton's respective policies. Unlike Palin, though, Clinton didn't use these comments as an attack method against McCain. Therefore, Palin's attack on the Democrats was a one-sided attempt to gain sympathy and support from women-which is probably the only way Republicans can gain women's votes these days.

Sarah Palin further carried out her victim card in the waning days of the campaign, as well as after the election was over. After the insane bill for her campaign wardrobe was released, she claimed that there was a double-standard between male and a female candidates when it came to media coverage; females were more scrutinized for how much they spent on their campaign wardrobes and how they looked than men were, a media focus that Palin said made people focus more on women candidates' clothing rather than their policies. This viewpoint can be summed up in a few sentences taken from Denton's book, "Rather than sticking to coverage of female candidates' platforms and professional experience, they instead choose to devote valuable air time and print space to frivolous topics such as wardrobe and hairstyle. Such coverage undermines women's abilities to present themselves as serious candidates and leaders because they are forced to spend time talking about lighthearted minutiae, rather than consequential political policy" (Denton 74-75).
Palin's political identity as a woman in the campaign was heavily shaped by her role as a victim and how the media portrayed her. Compared to Hillary Clinton, Palin was often seen as not being tough enough to take the criticism that was dished out to her in the political playing field, and also for making people wary based on her interesting family life and politicial decisions. Overall, playing the victim and concurring attacker role did not work out for the Republican Party or Sarah Palin, and she and John McCain were defeated by the man they cried "wolf" on for chauvinism, Barack Obama.