conservativeBrand

Letter to the Wall Street Journal editor, submitted today:

The Palin Puzzle (Wall Street Journal editorial, July 6, 2009), is not as perplexing for thinking Americans who also happen to be residents of Illinois. Our founders created our government as a representative democracy, peopled by temporary citizen legislators who came from and went back to the real world, where they grew their crops, built their businesses and served their communities. Term limits were something they took for granted. Why is it so difficult 233 years later to imagine how a young woman from the last American “frontier” might see more than one way to serve her country?

Feminists and pundits on both sides of the aisle are calling Sarah Palin a quitter. Here in Illinois, where we live with public corruption day-in and day-out, we sent a principled young politician from our State Senate to the U.S. Senate a few years back. Peter Fitzgerald took plenty of heat from the left and right, and he quit politics after only one term in Washington. But his legacy is the one effective antidote to corruption to hit the Illinois political machines in many decades: he appointed Patrick Fitzgerald to the job of U.S. Attorney for Northern Illinois. A couple of governors, as well as a mayor, are taking this legacy very seriously today.

Mothers who are politicians have choices as well, choices that may well be different from those of their male counterparts. I spent two terms on the lowest rung of the political ladder – a local elementary school board – while my three children were teens. Relentlessly virulent attacks were pretty much regular fare for my family during those eight years. Did it strengthen my kids and my marriage? The results, five years out, seem to be a qualified, yes. But the inevitable moral questions remain: what did we gain and what did we lose from my personal donation to participatory democracy?  Ask my twenty-something children today; ask Sarah Palin’s family.