Wink, wink, (wink, wink, wink,) nudge, nudge…do you get it yet? This is a joke.

Okay, I’m going to say it:  “I told you so!”

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote that Sarah Palin had winked at Charlie Gibson during her now infamous “answer” to the Bush Doctrine question. Cornered and desperate she retreated to a comfort zone:  the Um-I-don’t-know-the-answer-but-gosh-darnit-aren’t-I-cute defense.  And then last Thursday during the debate, it was even worse:  Check this out:

What was that?  Five or six times she winked at the “American People” while pasting together her mental Cliff Notes on Health Care, Tax Reform, and Foreign Policy?  I said it three weeks ago and I’ll say it again:  “We all know women like this.  The fake-it-until-you-can-make-it type.  The ex-prom and almost-beauty queens who recite ‘world view?’…er, I mean ‘World Peace?’ to every question. The popular girls who learned to handle men and controversy with a smile, a giggle, a glance, a wink.”

She and the McCain campaign are the first to cry “sexism,” but they are all using her sex appeal to flirt with answers and seduce voters. From the beginning, they cried ‘foul’ when reporters talked about Palin’s children or motherhood, and in the same breath the campaign extols her Vice Presidential qualifications as “hockey mom” or “mother of 5”. 

Last Thursday she was handed her hat by Joe Biden.  Palin meandered through a question invoking her “soccer-mom” (notice the slight spin with the stereotype to gain the largest sympathy) charicteristics.  When Biden had the chance to answer the question he nearly broke down in tears, recalling his late wife and the two boys that he raised through a tragic and almost fatal accident.  Like Hillary’s moment of tears in the Primaries that evoked so much discussion of sexism, Biden’s moment called us back to the reality of modern parenting:  Men are parents, too.  And if we truly want to move past sexism, we stop trying to bank on sexual stereotypes when it’s convenient and ignore them otherwise.