Ace Schools Professor Althouse

We're not sure what kind of burr got under Althouse's saddle today, but Ace does to her arguments what Tom Knapp does to clays with an off-the-shelf Benelli shotgun:

Althouse argues that Sarah Palin's "passivity" and reluctance to stand up for herself vis a vis the McCain campaign's determination that she should start her interviews with Katie Couric and the like proves she's kinda dumb.

She seems to be making some feminist point about women being just as capable of men and therefore, her thinking goes, needing to act in that fashion, and not whine later that their opinions were overlooked.

Why didn't you have a say [about what media you were interviewed by]? There's that "really" hedging: You didn't really have a say. You're pleading passivity and impotence but you want us to think you have what it takes to be President of the United States?

As a general proposition about women's need to assert themselves, maybe she has a point, but here, I think her Sisters Gotta Do It For Themselves analysis overlooks a major point: Sarah Palin did not act as a subordinate to John McCain due to her sex, or her gender's desire to avoid conflict, or anything at all like that. 

She acted as a subordinate to John McCain because she really was [a] subordinate to John McCain. Althouse's analysis seems to easily gloss over the fact that John McCain really was the boss here, and Sarah Palin really was the underling.

I don't know if Althouse, being a tenured (I assume) professor, really has a "boss" anymore, or if her status means that she's essentially the Boss of Herself. So perhaps she has forgotten: Whether you are male or female, and whether your boss is male or female, the boss gets his way.

The underling may offer suggestions. The underling may protest. But at the end of the day, the boss gets his way.

So I don't view this as some kind of "Sarah Palin is too weak to stand up for herself" thing. I view it instead as "Sarah Palin joined a team, with the express (and historically well-founded) understanding that all choices about the campaign are ultimately made by the actual captain of the team -- the presidential candidate -- and conducted herself accordingly, despite the fact that she thought the boss was erring badly."

Read Ace's full lesson here.

- JP