Cal Berkeley Democrats

Attack Palin and Bachmann for their terrible ideas, not their gender

Recently while watching “Hardball” with Chris Matthews on MSNBC, a story disturbed me. The anchor was delving into the GOP candidates for President in 2012, and specifically talking about Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann’s intentions to run for President. To be clear, I dislike the two candidates a great deal, and both (if elected) will make terrible Presidents in my mind because of their flawed and misguided agendas for this country.

On the show, the anchor asked two guests if “it is sexist … to automatically do a comparison to Michele Bachmann” when talking about Sarah Palin’s run for President. Both guests (including one woman) said no, but it didn’t stop there. One of the guests noted that since the two women are similar in appeal, they can get “only one foot into the glass slipper” and that it wasn’t sexist to compare the two candidates. They said very little about the women’s agendas, their ideas, their policy proposals, their credentials or their records. Rather than attack the women on their flawed agendas, they spent their time comparing the two candidates to each other, like there was no way that either of them deserved to be compared to any other GOP Presidential candidates.

This concerns me. When every single story about the women (including this one) fails to consider the two candidates outside the scope of their female candidacy, this is sending a dangerous message to women across the nation with political aspirations. When young girls watch the news at night with their parents, what do they see? What is the media saying about the capability of any woman to reach the White House? While I hope that none of those girls aspire to be Sarah Palin or Michele Bachmann, the media is sending a dangerous message to the next generation of women political leaders from both parties, and it needs to stop for our country to move forward.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Csbi41QZBw