The vitriol aimed at Palin is difficult to figure. The drag queens of West Hollywood, no doubt envious of being the real thing, hang her in effigy ("all in good fun"); the scorn and mockery in the media continues relentlessly. But the anger among the women who you might think would cheer her pluck and smarts descends into the hysterical and the mindless. Maybe the feminists think she stole their revolution; she has done what they couldn't do. She's a self-made woman, with a family of five, who took on the old boys in Alaska and beat them at their sordid game while holding onto her femininity. She didn't chip away at her convictions just to get where she is.
Pro-choice feminists pay lip service to the idea that it's all right for a woman to refuse an abortion to live up to her moral values, but there's usually a little snickering on the side, suggesting that she just doesn't know any better. Palin's choice, to spurn an abortion to give birth to a Down syndrome child, makes the moral clarity of her decision unassailable. She accepted the full consequences of choice. The most malicious remark I've heard is the suggestion that she wouldn't have had the child if she weren't a prominent politician, pandering to her base.
Joseph Epstein, writing in The Weekly Standard, tells how the faces of the liberal women he knows take on a purplish tinge at the mention of her name: "'Moron' is their most frequently used noun, though 'idiot' comes up a fair number of times." Cliches are much loved on the left.
Though questioning the governor's range of experience is fair comment, it's astonishing to me that those who think she's not ready to play second banana in Washington have no qualms about voting for Barack Obama, who has less executive and administrative experience than she. In fact, he has none.
Sarah Palin, if she is not the vice president, is likely to move quickly beyond defeat to other chances to demonstrate that she's the real thing, leaving her bitter critics to stew in the juice of their own frustrations. Yogi might say that when she came to a fork in the road, she took it.