Sarah Palin clings to both guns and religion, and she is America’s new darling. A fresh face from Alaska and the first woman on a Republican ticket, Palin embodies change. She and John McCain are known for eschewing party lines. Neither is conventional.
Contrast that to Barack Obama and Washington graybeard Joe Biden, peddling a refried ’60s agenda, and there can be no doubt which ticket is most committed to shaking up the status quo. It’s no wonder that Obama sounded almost desperate this weekend when he said that for McCain and Palin to represent themselves as agents of change, “they must really think you’re stupid.”
But just who is kidding whom? Obama and Biden characterize themselves as champions of the middle class — the candidates who most closely identify with Joe and Sally Lunchbucket. Yet Obama is a graduate of Harvard Law School married to a Princeton grad — Cliff and Claire Huxtable on steroids — living in a $1.65 million home, befitting their status as multimillionaires. Their two daughters attend the private University of Chicago Lab School, where tuition is $18,492 for a first-grader and $20,286 for a fifth-grader. The school’s registration fee is $1,000 per child; the cost to ride the bus is $2,495 a year. How many middle-class Americans can afford to spend $45,768 a year to send two kids to elementary school?
And Biden’s three children are graduates of Archmere Academy in Delaware, where the annual tuition is $18,450, plus $300 to $500 for books, $200 to $300 for uniforms and $2,500 to $3,000 to ride the bus.
Incredibly, these Democrats are trying to convince voters that they are more in touch with working Americans than Sarah Palin, who is married to a union member, sends her kids to public schools and feeds them macaroni and cheese. Do they think we’re stupid?
Democratic women — the same ones who swooned over Hillary Clinton “shattering the glass ceiling” — are now in high dudgeon that McCain is trying to win them over by putting a woman on his ticket. And they are right: Republican women would eat their pearls before casting a vote for Clinton. But why aren’t these Democratic women outraged that Obama is making the same insulting assumption by dispatching women to rally the sisterhood against Palin? Throughout the campaign, Obama has cast himself as the defender of working mothers, yet he allows his allies to pillory Palin for presuming she can have five children and be vice president.
First of all, being vice president is probably the best job a working mother could have. Her kids will be chauffeured everywhere and guarded by Secret Service agents. She will have government servants to clean the house, cook the meals, buy the groceries, do the laundry and run the family’s errands.
Moreover, how taxing can the vice presidency be? Dick Cheney has spent the better part of almost eight years hiding out in undisclosed locations and hunting quail. If he didn’t occasionally fill a friend’s face with buckshot, taxpayers wouldn’t even know where he was. And did it I miss it, or was there criticism of Michelle Obama for leaving her two young daughters in their grandmother’s care so she could join her husband on the campaign trail for much of the past year and a half? Did anyone criticize Biden for taking his seat in the Senate after his first wife’s death in a car accident left him with two motherless preschoolers?
The most breathtaking hypocrisy, of course, is the Democrats’ claim that Palin is too inexperienced to be one heartbeat away from the presidency. As she pointed out in her convention speech, Palin’s service as mayor of a small town certainly entailed more responsibility than Obama’s years as a neighborhood organizer.
And his experience as a part-time lecturer at the University of Chicago (affording his claim to be a “constitutional law professor”) certainly provided him no more experience in national or international politics than Palin’s chairmanship of Alaska’s Oil and Gas Conservation Commission. As a governor, she has had executive experience. As a senator, he has had none. Both are inexperienced in international politics. But she isn’t running for president. Obama’s case for being elected is that, despite his inexperience, he is smart and charismatic and good-looking and young and has a compelling personal story. Yet he wants voters to believe that the same traits that qualify him to be president somehow don’t apply equally to Palin.
There is only one conclusion to draw from that: He must think we’re really stupid.
Melanie Scarborough, whose Examiner column appears on Monday, lives in Alexandria.
