"Poor Sarah", My Ass

Judith Warner's September 25th column on Sarah Palin didn't give me pause. It gave me friggin' heartburn. Before I start on a tirade about Palin though, I have a thing or two to say about Judith Warner.

Warner's weekly column, Domestic Disturbances, generally makes me roll my eyes. She writes about modern parenting, or rather, Modern Parenting Through the Eyes of the Privileged, which, seriously, I couldn't care less about. Unfortunately, I get sucked into reading her columns on occasion. I think she's a little young to legitimately be a baby boomer, but she engages in the same navel-gazing, "my mother's hairbrush is a metaphor for life" syndrome that my generation is so embarrassingly fond of. So I approach her columns with some trepidation. She's semi-heir to Anna Quindlan, whose persona was "I'm just a mom who happens to write for a newspaper", except Quindlan was politically savvy and only made me want to tear my hair out about 25% of the time. Warner, on the other hand, often gives me a migraine.

OK, so: Poor Sarah. Warner, upon seeing a photo of Palin sitting next to Henry Kissinger, has a lightbulb moment during which she realizes that Palin is in over her head, knows it and is afraid of being found out. Well, some of us knew that from the get-go. And I have yet to meet anyone who didn't suffers from Imposter Syndrome. So that's not what I would call a unique position for Palin to be in. Maybe it's unique to her, because I can imagine her being so arrogant that it never before occurred to her that she didn't know what she was doing.

Then Warner has the almighty gall to call Palin our Inner Elle Woods.

I think I’ve seen it now. In her own folded hands, her hopeful, yet sinking posture, her eager-to-please look. Sarah Palin is their — dare I say our? — inner Elle Woods.

I had thought of Elle Woods, the heroine of the 2001 and 2003 “Legally Blonde” and “Legally Blonde 2” films, a great deal during the week that Palin became McCain’s running mate and made her appearance at the Republican National Convention. The thoughts didn’t actually originate with Palin; my daughter Julia had recently discovered the soundtrack of “Legally Blonde: the Musical” and then the movies that inspired the Broadway show.

Re-watching the movies with Julia, I’d been surprised at how time, and motherhood, had tempered my affection for Elle Woods — a frilly, frothy blonde who charms her way into Harvard Law School and takes the stodgy intellectual elitists there by storm with her Anygirl decency and non-snooty (and not-so-credible) native intelligence.

I’d found the “Legally Blonde” movies fun the first time around. Viewing them in the company of an enraptured 11-year-old, who’d declared Elle her new “role model” after months of dreaming of growing up to be a neuroscientist in a long braid and Birkenstocks, was another story.

“You can’t,” I’d admonished Julia, “accomplish anything worthwhile in life just by being pretty and cute and clever. You have to do the work.”

Let me tell you about Elle Woods. She was a bubbled-headed sorority girl whose innate smarts were stifled by parents who never expected any more from her than to marry rich. She was treated like an idiot when she arrived at Harvard because she was in foreign territory and didn't know the rules. But, BUT, despite what Warner says in her column, Elle did do the work. Has Palin done any of the work? Not only that, but after Elle's been humiliated at a party by one classmate and told by another to go back to her sorority, Elle says "At least if you showed up at my sorority, I would have been nice to you." And she would have. I think if Palin were humiliated like that, she would have made everyone's life a living hell. Who became Elle's best friend in Legally Blonde? A blowsy manicurist who had terrible self-esteem and who used to live in a trailer. Would Palin be caught dead hanging out with someone like that? She'd probably treat her like a servant, and not in the "she's just like a member of the family" way.

This, though, is what sent me over the edge.

You don’t have to be perennially pretty in pink — and ditsy and cutesy and kinda maybe stupid — to have an inner Elle Woods. Many women do. I think of Elle every time I dress up my insecurities in a nice suit. So many of us today — balancing work and family, treading water financially — feel as if we’re in over our heads, getting by on appearances while quaking inside in anticipation of utter failure. Chick lit — think of Bridget Jones, always fumbling, never quite who she should be — and in particular the newer subgenre of mom lit are filled with this kind of sentiment.

You don’t have to be female to suffer from Impostor Syndrome either — I learned the phrase only recently from a male friend, who puts a darned good face forward. But I think that women today — and perhaps in particular those who once thought they could not only do it all but do it perfectly, with virtuosity — are unique in the extent to which they bond over their sense of imposture.

I saw this feeling in Palin — in a flash, on that blue couch, catty-corner to Kissinger, as her eyes pleaded for clemency from the camera. I’ll bet you anything that her admirers — the ones whose hearts really and truly swell with a sense of kinship to her — see or sense it in her, too. They know she can’t possibly do it all — the kids, the special-needs baby, the big job, the big conversations with foreign leaders. And neither could they.

Really? REALLY? They know she can't do it all, so they want her to...have it all? Even though she won't do the work? Why would a woman with any smarts want a VP who's so intimidated by meetings with foreign leaders that she can't hide it? Are we going to play the girl card now?

There's no doubt that the Repubs carry some blame in this. After all, they're the ones who chose her, and yes, they're using her. But is she really at the beck and call of The Men? Some people think McCain is the one who's being used, and that he should probably get a metaphorical soup taster. Palin is indeed over her head, but she's no delicate flower who needs to be protected.

Like any grown-ass woman, Palin should have put on her Big Girl Pants and thought about whether she was up to the challenge. Now she's in it and her ego and her ambition won't allow her to get out of it. So I'm not feeling too sorry for Sarah Palin right now.