September 3rd 2008
Lefty Mom And Hockey Mom
M
y Inside- the- beltway mother, so hardcore liberal in her beliefs she had convinced herself that I would share her immediate and intense dislike of Sarah Palin, is Lefty Mom. (I admit I picked the accompanying photo just to bug her.)
Guess who Hockey Mom is. Hint: She just gave a heck of a speech in St. Paul.
Even though my dear, much-loved mother is Lefty Mom, the hardcore inside- the- beltway liberal, I was surprised by our conversation last night.
She: What do you think of the Sarah Palin?
Me: I’ve been tracking her since February and I think she’s excellent. She’ll hold the conservative base for McCain and appeal to Independents.
She: Oh, I think she’s just awful. I thought you’d be upset McCain chose her. He could drop dead at any minute …
Let me interrupt here to note that John McCain is 72, which is >cough!< years younger than my mom. Hint: Rhymes with swift-teen
She: … and then we’d have a woman with no foreign policy experience in the White House …
Me: Well, if we elect Obama, we’ll have a president with no foreign policy experience in the White House without anyone having to die first.
She: … and we don’t want a woman with five children to be president!
I could have challenged her for the flaming, ugly hypocrisy of her statement – the assumption that women are incapable; the assumption that husbands and sons and daughters can’t help – but she’s not my enemy; she’s my mom. Still, it hurt to hear this from her. How is it that dedicated left-wing believers in strong women can drop their entire belief systems in a heartbeat just because the parentheses surround an R instead of a D?
Lefty Mom has always prided herself on being a woman ahead of the pack, and for good reason. A strong-willed child, she decided early she was going to be an ambassador and worked in the State Dept. secretarial pool after college, with the intention of working her way out of there soon enough. Fortunately for me, handsome Naval officer redirected her ambitions, but before I was 10, she was back to work, eventually becoming a celebrity journalist in Tokyo.
(Her childhood wish actually came true. At a dinner last year in DC, former ambassador to Japan Mike Mansfield told the crowd that they were honored to have America’s best-ever ambassador to Japan with them in the room – Jean Pearce.)
I would like to think that as she watched Palin’s speech tonight, as I’m sure she did, her thinking changed and she began to see the wisdom of McCain’s choice, but what I would like and what I know are real are two different things. I know that she heard a very different speech from the one I heard, and that her opinion hasn’t changed one bit, except perhaps to turn even more against Northern Mom.
But there’s one thing: Lefty Mom (like Peggy Noonan, I guess) is exceptional. She’s elitist, an ex-patriot who came home late in life, surrounded by like-thinking friends. She may have been unmoved by Palin’s speech, but she is one of the exceptions.
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September 6th, 2008 at 11:55 am
Comments
September 4th, 2008 at 8:24 am
This really hit home, because my Mom is Lefty Mom, my sister is Lefty Sister, my husband is Lefty husband — and they buy into every single horrible thing the media has said about Palin.