So What Is Fair Game With Sarah Palin? Look at the Rules Hillary Clinton Had to Play By!

[DeepModem Mom]

WP: So What Is Fair Game With Sarah Palin? Look at the Rules Hillary Clinton Had to Play By.
By Anne E. Kornblut
Sunday, September 7, 2008; B01

....After following (Senator Hillary) Clinton on the campaign trail for more than two years, I have been watching the Palin story with some wariness -- especially the conservative charges that the treatment she's received has been overwhelmingly sexist. With each new development, I keep wondering: What if?

What if, back in the 1990s, Clinton had announced the pregnancy of an unmarried, teenaged daughter? Would the Republicans have declared it an off-limits family matter and declined to judge her, or would it have turned into a national scandal that hurt her chances as she decided to pursue her own career in elected office?

What if, instead of the GOP's new vice presidential candidate, Clinton had been the one to run for national office without any international experience to speak of? (After all, Clinton's rivals diminished the relevance of her eight years as first lady, saying they counted for little on her résumé.)

And what if Clinton had rejected questions about her record by calling such lines of questioning sexist? What if she had refused to name any national security decisions she had made, as a spokesman for Sen. John McCain did on Palin's behalf last week, on the grounds that the question was unfair?

What if, simply, the roles had been reversed?...

***

That is not to say that every awkward detail of Palin's personal life is an acceptable target -- or that Democrats, reporters and bloggers ought to pursue Palin in all of the aggressive ways that Clinton has been grilled for most of her political life. It is also not to suggest that Clinton always openly answered questions about her own record or did not manipulate her femininity to her advantage when it suited her political needs....

Still, in her first week on the national stage, Palin and her surrogates have brandished the sexism charge more unabashedly than Clinton has over the course of two very public decades. And Palin has not yet even faced serious questioning in person, in an interview or in a one-on-one debate. If Clinton's message was that she was a survivor -- that she had been vetted and tested, her viewpoints scrutinized, with all of her personal problems known to the country -- Palin's has so far been that she has, by virtue of being nominated, already passed every test that Clinton took. Palin's mantra, it seems, is that women no longer need to surpass men in their achievements and qualifications in order to win; they simply need to object when the question of their preparedness is raised....

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09/05/AR2008090502656_pf.html

[napi21]

1. I'm listening to Ring of Fire, and they just said they agree with

Barack that children & families should be off limits EXCEPT they feel if the candidate has made her political stances on ABSTINANCE ONLY ed, & CHASTITY ONLY, THAOSE positions put her familiy circumstances back on the table!

I also think it's FAIR GAME to bash her for pretending to be like Hillary and the ONLY think that makes them similar is their body parts!