Twenty Set’s Monica O’Brien interviewed several Gen-Y women by e-mail as part of her postmortem of the 2008 election. She just posted a piece on the role female candidates and First Lady-to-be Obama played and the ramifications of their presence on the very public political stage for future elections.
You can find my thoughts on why Hillary lost and what Michelle Obama represents to professional women over at Twenty Set.
Sam Harris is a great writer (The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason). Today, his column makes a very important about Sarah Palin’s nomination to the Republican ticket: Average isn’t good enough.
Americans seem to think the very serious executive posts of President and Vice President are something akin to an episode of American Idol or Donald Trump’s The Apprentice. The reality is the weight of the world will literally be placed upon the shoulders of the person elected in November.
Sarah Palin is a great hockey mom and governor of a small, oil-pumping state. It’s not just that she’s not in Hillary Clinton‘s league. She’s not the caliber of Putin or Gordon Brown or Kofi Annan. I can’t take anyone seriously who puts her in the same category as those leaders. And that she considers herself qualified to go head-to-head with such world leaders, since she’s just a heartbeat away from the Oval Office, is yet another sign of her bad judgement and McCain’s.
Americans have an unhealthy desire to see average people promoted to positions of great authority. No one wants an average neurosurgeon or even an average carpenter, but when it comes time to vest a man or woman with more power and responsibility than any person has held in human history, Americans say they want a regular guy, someone just like themselves. President Bush kept his edge on the “Who would you like to have a beer with?” poll question in 2004, and won reelection.
This is one of the many points at which narcissism becomes indistinguishable from masochism. Let me put it plainly: If you want someone just like you to be president of the United States, or even vice president, you deserve whatever dysfunctional society you get. You deserve to be poor, to see the environment despoiled, to watch your children receive a fourth-rate education and to suffer as this country wages — and loses — both necessary and unnecessary wars.
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