Debate

Tonight is the big night.... The VP debate in St. Louis! When the debate locations were announced, people from Washington University in St. Louis seemed sad that, for the first time in several presidential elections, the university was not selected to host a presidential debate. Now, however, people are buzzing with excitement.


Tom left early this morning in hopes of getting on campus before the security clampdown started at 9:00. He has been posting pictures to his Flickr account of the hoopla, including this news van ouside his office window



and this row of trucks yesterday near the athletic fields (which were the site, by the way, of the 1904 Olympics).


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In honor of the debate, a few more thoughts on Sarah Palin. When her selection was announced, I was at first delighted to see a mother of young children gain national prominence. Research indicates that women who are mothers are judged to be less competent than nonmothers (even when their experience, job performance, and qualifications are identical), and having a Palin on the national stage could go a long way towards combating those stereotypes.

There's only one problem: Palin is not competent. The few interviews she's granted have shown her to be hesitant, incurious, and in way over her head. Yes, Biden is famous for his gaffes--but in between them, he is able to talk sense about a wide variety of issue. Writing for Slate, Emily Bazelon pretty much sums up my fears:

Palin is the most prominent woman on the political stage at the moment. By taking unprepared hesitancy and lack of preparation to a sentence-stopping level, she's yanking us back to the old assumption that women can't hack it at these heights. We know that's not true—we've just watched Hillary Clinton power through a campaign with a masterful grasp of policy and detail. Clinton lost in part because she was the girl grind. Complex sentences, the names of Supreme Court cases, and bizarre warnings about foreign heads of state invading our airspace weren't her problem. The fear now is that Palin is the anti-Hillary and that her lack of competence threatens to undo what the Democratic primary did for women. Palin won't bust through the ceiling that has Hillary's 18 million cracks in it. She'll give men an excuse to replace it with a new one.

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Finally, also from Slate, Hart Seely has created some entertaining found poetry from the interviews of Sarah Palin. The poems are in the spirit of Poetry Under Oath, which transformed testimony from Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky into striking little poems. I'm sure someone could do the same for the words of Joe Biden, but at least according to a cursory Google search, so far no one has. Readers? Are you up for the challenge?