Sarah Palin’s publishing and political worlds in collision
Mary Matalin, CNN.com

“Going Rogue” will now be a “comp” (or baseline) for assessing the value of and advances for political “big books,” so all you big book writers of the future better hope it sells big — or your future advances won’t be.

What Palin’s Detractors Don’t Understand
John Hudson, Atlantic Wire

A New Style of Feminist Her Detractors Will Never Appreciate, writes Melanie Kirkpatrick in The Wall Street Journal: “Mrs. Palin’s veep candidacy ignited fury on the left and much skewed reporting in the mainstream media. It is probably too much to hope that a book that begins at the Right to Life booth at the Alaska State Fair will inspire her critics to read on. But if they do, they’ll find themselves in the company of a woman whose views are more nuanced than they were portrayed to be during the campaign… Through it all, Mrs. Palin emerges as a new style of feminist: a politician who took on the Ole Boy network and won; a wife with a supportive husband whose career takes second place to hers; and a mother who, unlike working women of an earlier age, isn’t shy about showcasing her family responsibilities. She writes with sensitivity and affection about her gay college roommate, and she confesses her anguish when she found out that she was carrying a baby with Down syndrome. That experience, she says, helped her to understand why a woman might be tempted to have an abortion. This is not the prejudiced, dim-witted ideologue of the popular liberal imagination.”

Who’s Team Is It, Anyway?
Katha Pollitt, The Nation

Women Democrats have taken an awful lot of hits for the team lately. Many of us didn’t vote for Hillary Clinton in the primary because the goal of electing a woman seemed less important than the goal of electing the best possible president. Only a self-hater or a featherhead didn’t feel some pain about that. And although women are hardly alone in this, we’ve seen some pretty big hopes set aside in the first year of the Obama administration. The Paycheck Fairness Act, which would expand women’s protections against sexism in the workplace, is on the back burner. Meanwhile, the Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships is not only alive and well; it’s newly staffed with antichoicers like Alexia Kelley of Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good, who, as Frances Kissling notes in Salon, has compared abortion to torture.

What White Women Want, Surprisingly GOP
David Paul Kuhn, Real Clear Politics

Schultz, and many liberal women alike, forget the tens of millions of women who view women’s interests differently. White women are the largest bloc of social conservatives. And that indeed has regional implications. Half of all social conservatives live in the South.

Fighting for the Future of Feminism
Heather Horn, Atlantic Wire

Is feminism dead? Leslie Sanchez hopes so, and her new book has more than a few feminists up in arms. Debates about female politicians, or the backlash to women’s liberation, aren’t new, but the New Yorker’s Ariel Levy is wondering how feminism got to be so divisive. She addresses some of the book’s pressing questions: What is feminism now? Has Sarah Palin broken the mold for politically ambitious women? What does the feminist movement, after the victories of past decades, still have anything to offer? As liberal advocates of female empowerment engage in some soul-searching, here are their answers:

Truly Remarkable Academic Insights on Sarah Palin
David French, Phi Beta Cons

It has often been said that today’s rank-and-file conservative is “anti-elite.” I’ve always been uncomfortable with that characterization because — in my experience — conservatives are quite respectful of certain kinds of elites, like elite soldiers, elite athletes, and talented musicians and other artists (provided those artists don’t believe that their abilities also provide them with unique insight into, say, health-care policy or war strategy). The elite that conservatives tend to disdain is the contemporary intellectual (or academic) elite, not because intellectual excellence isn’t obtainable or worth respecting but because we look at what what passes for academic thinking these days and, frankly, it’s remarkably unimpressive.

Nowhere is this high-minded mediocrity on better display than in the near-universal disdain for Sarah Palin. And today’s Inside Higher Ed provides a tremendous gift, a near-perfect example of condescending nothingness masquerading as insight.

Palintology
Scott McLemee, Inside Higher Ed

Important as it was, the campaign of Barack Obama was not the only history-making element of the 2008 presidential election. With Sarah Palin, we crossed another epochal divide. The boundary between reality television and American politics (already somewhat weakened by the continuous “American Idol” plebiscite) finally collapsed.