Here’s Heather MacDonald (who coauthored a book with Victor Davis Hanson) on the GOP’s adoption of identity politics:
http://www.city-journal.org/2008/eon0830hm.html
Heather Mac Donald
Sarah Palin (R-Diversity)
Republicans betray their principles by playing identity politics.
30 August 2008
Thanks a lot, John McCain. With his selection of an unknown, two-year female governor as his running mate, he has just ensured that the diversity racket will be an essential component of presidential politics forever more. Had the 44-year-old Sarah Palin, whose greatest political accomplishment before being elected Alaska’s governor in 2006 was serving as mayor of Wasilla (population 9,780), been named Stanley, she would have had exactly zero chance of ending up in the Oval Office in the next four years. But from now on, any presidential ticket that consists solely of white males—no matter their qualifications—will likely be dead in the water. . .
Palin herself drew on hackneyed feminist bromides at her first rally as vice presidential nominee, quoting no less an establishment diversocrat than Hillary Clinton. Clinton’s run had “left 18 million cracks in the highest, hardest glass ceiling in America,” Palin said in Dayton, Ohio, yesterday. “It turns out that the women of America aren’t finished yet, and we can shatter that glass ceiling once and for all.”
I thought that conservatives scoffed at the idea that American society systematically blocks accomplished women from advancement. But within less than an hour of the vice-presidential announcement yesterday morning, the diversity epidemic had spread rapidly in the Republican political machinery, including among analysts for whom I have only the highest respect. Talk-show host Laura Ingraham enthused about Palin’s identity profile: “A lot of women are calling in excited,” Ingraham said. “The women of America will see that she might be the first woman vice president.” Palin’s identity-based advantages go beyond gender, in Ingraham’s view: “Palin has an Eskimo husband, a Down’s Syndrome son, an Iraq-bound son.” CNBC host Larry Kudlow echoed Ingraham’s assessment: “This is a breakthrough for the stodgy Republican party.” . . .
Nevertheless, it’s a sad day when Republicans decide to match the Democratic predilection for chromosomal consciousness, since there will be no turning back.
