What Exactly Does the VP Do?

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Not buying it

My sister alerted me to this brand-new McCain ad:

I'm not sure where to start. There's one thing to be said about the fact that the GOP now thinks it's appropriate to use Hillary Clinton, circa New Hampshire, as their attack dog for John McCain, in the present. There's another lesson to learn about the dangers of an overly negative primary (forgive me, I just finished reading Josh Green's dissection of the Clinton implosion, so the whole Mark Penn thing is still stuck in my head). There's some gendered reading, which maybe I'll get to.

But the most obvious point is: This is very, very clear gender-baiting, and race certainly isn't absent from the picture, either. This is as close as the campaign can get to openly calling out women who are still unhappy with Hillary's primary loss without tossing around the word "bitter" (remember how that worked for Obama?). The subtext is: "Ladies, still upset about the primary? Vote your revenge - McCain '08!" I can think of no other reason why the McCain campaign would suddenly lionize a woman with whom its candidate has virtually no policy agreements. The ad reads remarkably like Jesse Helms' infamous "Hands" ad, which showed a pair of white hands crumpling a job rejection letter while the somber-voiced narrator blames it on affirmative action. Here again, the young upstart snatches the job from the deserving candidate, the one who had been waiting patiently in line (if you're a little uncomfortable with Obama's race) or the one who had overcome so much prejudice and broken so many barriers just to become a contender (if gender is your bag). He doesn't deserve it; he stole what is rightfully ours. John McCain will put things right again.

Here is how I wish we would respond: We're not buying it, and John McCain can't manipulate us. It's true that, no matter how hard we've tried to pretend, gender has been omnipresent in this election. Millions of women supported Hillary Clinton not only because they believed she would be the best leader for America, but also because they believed it was damn well time for a woman to break the highest glass ceiling in American politics. Millions of other women, including me, supported Barack Obama even as we recognized that Hillary's achievement was historic, inspirational, and groundbreaking. Gender was and still is a factor, yes, but John McCain can't just trot out photos of the most high-profile woman in American politics and expect to tug so strongly at our heartstrings that we'll just swing on over to his side. We won't buy that cheap trick, and here's why.

We won't buy it because, no matter what the GOP's strategists might think, women, just as well as men, can see right through emotional appeal when the facts demonstrate that John McCain has consistently stood in the way of equal rights and equal opportunity for women. If the Democrats do their job, women in the United States will be aware that John McCain, at least when he can recall, voted not once but twice against requiring insurance companies to cover birth control, so that income will not prevent anyone from gaining control over her body. We should know that McCain skipped the vote on, and would have opposed, the Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which would have helped women seeking legal remedies to pay discrimination. We ought to realize that McCain has an abysmal record when it comes to protecting a woman's right to choose, instead presuming that his belief that life begins at conception ought to be enshrined in policy rather than left for women to decide. We will remember that McCain supports federal funding for abstinence-only education, even though the curricula are ineffective and riddled with factual errors. The list goes on, but suffice it to say: Those of us who look at the facts are well aware that John McCain can try to exploit us by using Hillary Clinton's image, but we simply aren't having it any more.