Quote of the Day (October 10, 2011)

Thank You, Sarah Palin
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Kathryn Jean Lopez, at Catholic Vote:

“I firmly believe that Sarah Palin has been a gift to American culture. People criticize her (and then some) and the prominence of her family, but I’m grateful we’ve met Trig Palin. I’m grateful that his mother helped shatter the mainstream media myth that a woman in politics surrender femininity. Most importantly, though, before her, I’m not sure how many of us realized that upwards of 90 percent of children expected to be born with Down Syndrome are aborted.”

- JP

Kathryn Jean Lopez reviews 'America By Heart'

It’s a good book that stands on its own
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Another positive review of Heart and more excerpts:

It’s a good book that reflects exactly what people like about her — her passion for (as it happens) family, faith, and flag.

Palin has always been good at highlighting good things that might not otherwise get national attention, and she certainly does that in this book. She praises “unsung heroes” like the Catholic women religious Sisters of Life, “whose members not only pray for the protection of human life but do the hard, selfless work of caring for human life. They help mothers have and raise their children, and they counsel and comfort those who have made decisions they regret.”

[...]

This isn’t your traditional campaign book, by any stretch. This is more Book of Virtues meets biography, with long blockquotes and candid reflections. It stands on its own as a nice little contribution to our culture, campaign or no campaign.

[More]

- JP

Quote of the Day (November 20, 2010)

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Kathryn Jean Lopez at NRO's "The Corner":

"Sarah Palin’s new book, America by Heart: Reflections on Family, Faith, and Flag, is a well-done, well-written book that does what Governor Palin does best — highlights good things: good people, good principles, good institutions... It is a good read, with some fascinating inclusions."

- JP

Kathryn Lopez: What Women Don't Want

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What women don't want is Obama's fundamental transformation of the republic Dr. Franklin said the founders had given us if we can keep it. With her "Mama Grizzlies" video, Sarah Palin has sent a clear message that women are determined to keep it. In order to accomplish that, they might well make a transformation of their own. They have the tea parties as a vehicle to drive first principles home in what is shaping up to be a landmark political year. And more than "a few good men" are willing to fight by their sides. Kathryn Lopez gives her take on all this in her latest Townhall.com column:

Good advertising is not everything in politics, but it sure doesn't hurt. Kellyanne Conway, a prominent pollster and CEO, says that Palin "is calling for a 'Moms' Mobilization' to encourage millions of women like her to tell Washington to tighten its belt the way they have ... Palin is a good messenger for this mobilization because she is one of them. They may like her -- or not -- but they are LIKE her: a working mom with no Ivy League degree, who thinks Washington's 'new math' does not add up."

Many political observers thought Palin's video was the opening salvo -- or, at least trailer -- in the media star's 2012 presidential campaign. When, days later, her PAC issued impressive second-quarter fundraising results, that speculation only continued. But to focus on Palin is to underestimate what's going on in American politics.

It's not just Palin or even the scads of other attractive woman who are running for office as Republicans; this "year of conservative women" is manifesting itself in a big way in the Tea Party movement...

[...]

John Paul II called it the "feminine genius." Alexis de Tocqueville chivalrously observed it in us: "If anyone asks me what I think the chief cause of the extraordinary prosperity and growing power of this nation, I should answer that it is due to the superiority of their women."

The rise of the mama grizzlies hardly spells the "end of men," Claremont's Pitney emphasizes, knowing that one prominent magazine recently declared just that. It's simply confirmation, once again, of the complementarily of the sexes and the gifts each one brings to the table, essential even for politics.

Read K-Lo's full op-ed at Townhall.com.

- JP

K-Lo: Newsweek Cover Story Is a Caricature of Christianity

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Kathryn Jean Lopez is the latest to take on Newsweek's “Saint Sarah" cover story, which the NRO editor and nationally syndicated columnist roundly criticizes in an opinion piece for the National Catholic Register:

You’d think she were one of the mysteries of our faith, all the writing that has gone into trying to grapple with the political career and attraction to and hatred for former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin.

In the case of the recent Newsweek cover portraying Palin as “Saint Sarah” — in a backhanded canonization not quite the same as the Vatican approach — the quandary isn’t all that mysterious. The Newsweek story, written by a writer who fashions herself as an expert on religion, once again has the magazine betraying an ignorant caricature of Christianity in its newsroom.

Take, for instance: “Many Christian women loathe Palin, of course, and many men love her, but a certain kind of conservative, Bible-believing woman worships her.”

I’m not so sure that was just a cute stylistic maneuver. The pro-life Christian conservative woman is an exotic creature in this particular venue. To the outsider, devotion to saints would be far from the strangest thing a Catholic does. Further, in a country where Barack Obama has, at times, been likened to a deity, why wouldn’t someone worship Sarah Palin too?

Newsweek recounts her honesty about her most recent pregnancy. She had a dark thought. This, in Christianity, according to this newsmagazine, is anathema. Christians as human? Dark thoughts and temptations? How can that be? Never mind that perfect people would have never been in need of redemption and salvation.

These few excerpts are just the opening stanzas. You can read the full KJL article here.

- JP

Three views on Mama Grizzlies and the debate over feminism

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In the wake of the victories of a number of female candidates in the June 8 primary elections, pundits continue to weigh in on the significance on the mama grizzlies-versus-liberal-feminists debate. Here are excerpts from three opinion pieces on the topic, all of which mention Sarah Palin...

Kathryn Jean Lopez at National Review, "If Mama Ain’t Happy, She May Just Run . . . for Office":

Women are people too. We see the world differently than men because we are different, and complementary. But women also see the world differently from one another, woman to woman.

This is the breakthrough we’re seeing in American history right now, and it’s becoming next to impossible to deny these realities. The evidence is there, from Sarah Palin to Meg Whitman or even Democrat Blanche Lincoln. In the wake of a series of primary elections this June, there has been much talk that we are in another year of the political woman. And this time, she is frequently more right than left.

In truth, this is nothing shocking or new. The celebrated model of the female politician may have been a liberal, like Democrat Barbara Boxer, fighting against the rights of the most vulnerable among us, the unborn. But she was never every woman. In fact, those who fought for female suffrage were a different type, whether women who have voted subsequently realize it or not. They brought a maternal instinct to their activism.

When you meet a Sarah Palin or a Carly Fiorina, or the next woman the media goes into a frenzy over, you’re not actually meeting someone who appeared yesterday or who is somehow contrary to nature. When you look at some of the issues we’re debating today — issue such as preserving who we are and protecting those innocents — we’re in exactly the place as a nation where a few good women of this kind might do a world of good alongside a few good men.

The Left willl try to pretend a woman who doesn’t buy the party line of the professional-feminist sisterhood is somehow an oddity, even a traitor to women or a misogynist. (I’ve heard them all.) But the truth is that she may simply represent a commonsense backlash. The feminist movement tried to deny so much that women, uniquely, can bring to the cultural and political table. And America is moving on, Ms.

Ross Douthat at The New York Times, "No Mystique About Feminism":

When historians set out to date the moment when the women’s movement of the 1970s officially consolidated its gains, they could do worse than settle on last Tuesday’s primaries.

It was a day when most of the major races featured female candidates, and all the major female candidates won. They won in South Dakota and Arkansas, California and Nevada. They won as business-friendly moderates (the Golden State’s Meg Whitman); as embattled incumbents (Arkansas’s Blanche Lincoln); as Tea Party insurgents (Sharron Angle in Nevada). South Carolina gubernatorial hopeful Nikki Haley even came in first despite multiple allegations of adultery.

But mostly, they won as Republicans. Conservative Republicans, in fact. Conservative Republicans endorsed by Sarah Palin, in many cases. Which generated a certain amount of angst in the liberal commentariat about What It All Meant For Feminism.

“Do you still cheer,” Slate’s Sara Libby wondered of Whitman’s and Carly Fiorina’s California victories, “if the [glass] ceiling is crashed by two conservative businesswomen?” On “Good Morning America,” Tina Brown fretted that “it almost feels as if all these women winning are kind of a blow to feminism.” Writing in The Daily Beast, Linda Hirshman declared that support for abortion rights and Obamacare were litmus tests for true feminism, as opposed to the “selfish” variety that triumphed on Tuesday.

These conflicted responses echoed a similar debate that broke out a few weeks earlier, following a Palin speech in which she repeatedly laid claim to the feminist mantle — praising the “mama grizzlies” currently running for office as conservative Republicans, and hailing an “emerging, conservative, feminist identity.” Half the women in journalism, it seemed, weighed in on the address, with reactions ranging from “you’ve got to be [expletive] kidding me” on the Web site Jezebel to Meghan Daum’s declaration in The Los Angeles Times that if Palin “has the guts to call herself a feminist, then she’s entitled to be accepted as one.”

The question of whether conservative women get to be feminists is an interesting and important one. But it has obscured a deeper truth: Whether or not Palin or Fiorina or Haley can legitimately claim the label feminist, their rise is a testament to the overall triumph of the women’s movement.

The Washington Examiner's Barbara Hollingsworth, "Pro-life women take political center stage":

In 1869, being a feminist didn't automatically mean declaring war on unborn children. "When a woman destroys the life of her unborn child, it is a sign that, by education or circumstances, she has been greatly wronged," said suffragette Susan B. Anthony.

The Susan B. Anthony List, an Alexandria-based political action committee named after this heroine of women's rights, spent nearly $2 million to keep federal funding of abortion out of the recently passed health care bill. When that attempt failed, the group then commenced a $215,000 independent expenditure campaign on behalf of its top priority candidate: California Republican Carly Fiorina, the only woman ever to run a Fortune 20 company.

Last Tuesday, Fiorina -- whom SBA List President Marjorie Dannenfelser calls "the perfect pro-woman, pro-life contrast to Sen. Barbara Boxer" -- won her primary, as did other pro-life women such as gubernatorial candidates Meg Whitman in California and Nikki Haley in South Carolina, Senate candidate Sharron Angle in Nevada, and House candidate Kristi Noem in South Dakota. Dannenfelser called the results "an historic win for pro-life women candidates ... the greatest affirmation of our mission in the history of the organization."

In November, Fiorina will square off against Boxer, whom Dannenfelser describes as "the most aggressive champion of abortion rights in Congress."

Thirty-seven years after Roe v. Wade, abortion is at the heart of the fury directed against former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, who had the audacity to appear on stage at the Republican National Convention holding her Downs Syndrome infant and who pointedly refers to the pro-life women she endorses as "mama grizzlies."

The SBA List plans to spend $6 million more in the months before November's mid-term elections to support mama grizzlies and to punish "pro-life" Democrats who voted for Obamacare, which includes the greatest expansion of abortion since the 1973 Supreme Court decision.

Like their namesake, these grizzlies bite.

Follow the links to read the unedited original articles.

- JP

The New Feminism: Sarah Palin and the Mama Grizzlies

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A trio of recent posts of interest all deal with Sarah Palin and the new feminism. Conservative women are becoming increasingly activist, and proponents of the old feminism are howling in protest. We have excerpts from the three articles:

In a Fox News op-ed, Kellyanne Conway & Penny Nance say if this is not the "Year of the Woman," it is most certainly the year of the woman activist:

Sarah Palin said last week that the “mama grizzlies,” -- those women who are rising up and becoming advocates for their country -- would take back this nation. There is indeed a new breed of women activists in America today. Indeed, roughly 45% of Tea Party activists are women. However, they aren't like the women who came of age in the 60s and 70s who were shrugging off the "bondage" of children and families and rallying around a newfound independence. No, today's women activists have taken to the streets and the voting booths for just the opposite reason. These women are rising up in defense of their children, their grandchildren and their way of life.

The majority of women believe the stimulus has failed to create jobs and have rejected both bailouts and so-called health care reform. For the first time since Gallup has tracked the issue, the federal budget deficit – now over a trillion dollars – has replaced the economy, the environment and Social Security as the issue that worries Americans the most when they think about how America will look 25 years from now.

Why doesn't Washington get it? The nation's economic and fiscal health directly impacts women. They comprise a majority of the workforce partly because the recession has disproportionately affected men and has left women shouldering the burden of employment and kitchen table economics. They are the ones making the majority of financial decisions for their families, including health care decisions, yet it is women who will be paying the high price.

In an LA Times opinion piece, Meghan Daum argues that the new feminism may not be much like the old, but viewing men and women as equals should provide enough common ground for both liberals and conservatives to co-exist in the movement:

Using grizzly bears as a metaphor, Palin seemed to imply that the tenets of feminism — or at least the word itself — need not apply solely to liberal, abortion-rights supporting (and, by implication, gun-eschewing, gay-marriage-advocating, reusable-eco-bag-toting, dangling-earring-wearing) women. Red-state PTA moms with a love of God and country can get in on the empowerment act too.

[...]

I feel a duty (a feminist duty, in fact) to say this about Palin's declaration: If she has the guts to call herself a feminist, then she's entitled to be accepted as one.

I say this as someone who's unabashedly called herself a feminist (in public and in print) ever since, years ago, I established my own definition of it. In a nutshell, it goes like this: View men and women as equals; see your gender as neither an obstacle to success nor an excuse for failure; laugh at yourself occasionally; get out of bed in the morning; don't forget to vote.

As you can see, this mission statement applies to men and women, liberals and conservatives, evangelicals and atheists, the freshly shaved and the hairy armpitted. I may have opinions about abortion and other social issues closely associated with women's rights, but I see them as a separate matter from the question of whether I call myself a feminist.

And in a commentary at Townhall.com, NRO editor Kathryn Jean Lopez examines the old feminist hatred of Gov. Palin:

In many ways, the women among the Tea Party activists of today -- whom Palin counts as part of a "mom awakening" going on -- would be quite at home with their foremothers. If polls I've seen and rallies I've attended are any indication, today's female fighters are pro-life and sensible. They've seen the pain the last few decades of social radicalism has wrought. They're a danger to the feminist establishment.

[...]

One respondent to Palin argued: "Her usual rhetoric extolling the values and importance of freedoms doesn't extend to women." In the rhetoric and reality of the liberal feminist movement from which a comment like that is born, freedom doesn't extend to the unborn child. Increasingly, Americans are not tolerating this. In the tradition of the suffragettes, women, increasingly, will have none of it.

And so I understand why women of the left react early and often to Palin. It's not about her, it's about the threat to their power she represents. They've based so much of their political activism on the tenets of the sexual revolution, which have been such a disaster for women, men, children, and families. But the jig is up. It didn't fly with the likes of Anthony and Stanton. And it's increasingly not flying now. It's not the pro-lifers who went rogue in the first place.

Follow the links to read all three articles unabridged.

- JP

Quote of the Day (February 6, 2010)

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Kathryn Jean Lopez:

"I can't help but think of her Republican convention speech. More than a year and then some later, she's showing the same charm and verve and love of country that got people's attention in the first place. The woman has talent in giving voice to some real concerns in a way that resonates with people who have been discouraged and disengaged. And the way she frames it, it's actually not about her. The most important part of her speech tonight, I think, will prove to be what she said about personality: Politics can never be about a person. Not Barack Obama. Not Ronald Reagan. Not even Scott Brown. Not even Sarah Palin. It's about ideas. Brown got elected on them. Marco Rubio's running on them. Their trucks and looks may help, but it's the ideas."

- JP

K-Lo: Palin book more about reintroduction than score-settling

On NRO's The Corner blog, Kathryn Jean Lopez says Sarah Palin's memoir is not so much about revenge, as some in the liberal media have insisted. The National Review Online Editor says Going Rogue is more about the former governor's reintroduction:

I was struck by how different it is than it sounds on MSNBC (and elsewhere). It was easy to get the impression over and going into the weekend that the book was a whole lot of score-settling. Having done a speed read of it, I'd say it's a reintroduction more than score-settling.

Sure, Nicolle Wallace and Steve Schmidt aren’t giving it as Christmas gifts, but it’s not gratuitously nasty. In fact, it’s not even nasty..."

- JP

At NRO, K-Lo is no lily of the field

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"Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin" - Matthew 6:28

National Review Editor Kathryn Jean Lopez cannot be accused of being a lily of the field. She works hard, and she spins even harder for Mitt Romney. On the day that voters in NY-23 go to the polls in a contest that has taken on national significance as conservatives take a crucial step in their efforts to recapture the party of Reagan, K-Lo defends Mitt Romney's decision to stay out of the race in a piece titled Where's Mitt Romney?:

Less than a week before election day, while campaigning for the Republican gubernatorial candidate in Virginia, Bob McDonnell, Romney announced: “I have chosen not to endorse the Republican in the 23,” indicating that he thought that sent a message in and of itself.

His spokesman Eric Fehrnstrom elucidated: “Mitt Romney is a Republican and he tends to support the Republican candidate in races — and when he can’t, because there are too many differences on the issues, he stays out of the race altogether, and that’s the course he’s following in the New York special election. He doesn’t plan to make any endorsement at all.”

By not endorsing anyone in NY-23, the once and presumably future Republican presidential hopeful avoided the Gingrich problem — endorsing the Republican-who-could-comfortably-endorse-a-Democrat (and would!) — while avoiding the problem of opposing the candidate put forth by the party he would probably be approaching before long to support his own candidacy.

One could argue that Romney did what you would expect the establishment Republican candidate to do...

K-Lo calls it the "Let Romney Be Romney" cycle. And that what bothers us most about the former Massachusetts governor. There's always another "cycle" with him. He's been all over the political map on so many key issues that many conservatives feel that they just can't trust him. Mitt obviously believes that he has made the case that he really is a conservative and no longer needs to prove it to anyone.

But conservatives are engaged in a struggle from which they must emerge victorious to put the "Grand" back into the Grand Old Party and return it to its winning (i.e., Reaganite) ways. Romney's failure to stand up for Doug Hoffman stands in sharp contrast to Sarah Palin, who was the first viable 2012 GOP presidential prospect to endorse the conservative candidate. Once Sarah had taken her stand, Tim Pawlenty decided it was safe for him to follow her. Just because Mitt Romney didn't make the same mistake made by Newt Gingrich in endorsing the Daily Kos' candidate in the race, K-Lo wants us to believe that Mitt comes out of this smelling like a fresh lily. Though he may pass the smell test with establishment Republicans, conservatives by and large are not convinced of Mitt's deep and abiding commitment to the cause of conservatism. To win the confidence of conservatives, a presumptive leader must get down in the trenches with them, or at least cheer them on enthusiastically from the sidelines. Mitt Romney did neither.

Mitt's a favorite in the halls of the House that William F. Buckley built, especially with those in charge, like Rich Lowry and Kathryn Jean Lopez, so it's not a shocker when NRO spins for him. Everyone plays their favorites, it seems. Palin bloggers, most of us anyway, at least have her name or some part of it on the banners at the top of our front pages. Other right bloggers at least proclaim their conservatism in one way or another. Has National Review become an organ of the Republican establishment? If it is committed, as was Buckley to the cause of conservatism, why does it make excuses for those who opt out of a key battle for that cause?

- JP