Sarah Palin and the Future of Women in Politics

The 2008 presidential election measured not only how far women have progressed in politics but also what challenges remain, Republican strategist Leslie Sanchez argues in You've Come a Long Way, Maybe: Sarah, Michelle, Hillary, and the Shaping of the New American Woman. Sanchez, a former adviser to George W. Bush and a commentator on CNN, recently spoke with U.S. News about Palin, the chances of a female president, and why women are so tough on one another in politics. Excerpts:

How is Sarah Palin doing in her second turn on the national stage?

She's generated tremendous excitement and enthusiasm within the conservative base. A lot of that has to do with the fact that there's a void within GOP leadership right now. She's able to capitalize on that because she can take very complex subjects like healthcare and conceptualize them in a way that everybody can understand.

Is she trying to reach beyond conservatives?

She's cheering for one side of the stadium and making no effort to reach into the middle. Her strongest appeal is among the conservative base because she takes these weighty ideas and she talks about them. Her impact in terms of endorsements is certainly powerful and measurable, and third, she can raise tremendous amounts of money. People want to dismiss her and talk about her cadence or her style or the errors in her book or who she's appealing to, but she has something that every politician in Washington wants, and that's relevancy.

Must she broaden her appeal in order to run nationally?

Absolutely. There's basically three things that national contenders have to have. One of them is to show that they actually have an intellectual capacity to be commander in chief. The second thing you have to have is public service. She ran a state. She started strong initiatives in energy . . . but didn't really finish them. She had some successes there. And the third part is an understanding and a finessing of the media, which is critical. Somebody like Palin, her deficiency is that she's not working to erase the damage to her brand when it comes to having the intellectual capacity to be president. She couldn't have run for president from America's hinterland; she had to come down to the lower 48. That's a very good strategic move. And she's thumbing her nose at the press right now, making them the villain. And that's OK; there's a lot of bias in the media. But is she working hard to shore up her credentials in foreign policy and national security and understanding economic policy? I don't see that.

How do you think the media and the political establishment are doing this time around?

There's a tremendous amount of bias against Palin. People are whetting their appetite waiting for her to make another gaffe or an error or poor judgment, and they're missing the undercurrent of her appeal, that she can crystallize some of these issues and make them understandable to large segments of the population. The other part is she's on a tour where she's making it more celebrity oriented, like the Oprah Winfrey interview and Barbara Walters. She's not going to the tough news organizations. She's strictly going and trying to control her image to the best of her ability with lighter interviews, more lifestyle interviews, which do a lot to sell books and ingratiate her to a conservative base, but it doesn't do a lot to appeal to the middle.

What can we guess about her and 2012?

She just by virtue of being on the ['08] ticket would naturally historically be the front-runner. But what's interesting about Sarah Palin is she's trying to define her own strategy for getting somewhere. She doesn't want to follow the conventional—she's going to do it on her own. It's like watching a woman in high heels crossing an icy road—you just really never know what's going to happen. That's one of the reasons so many people are captivated by Palin. She's able to do many things gracefully that other individuals just don't have the capacity or the charisma to do.

How far have women come?

Not nearly as far as we'd like. One of the things that the 2008 election did expose is that women were still the most critical of other women. A lot of women were not familiar with how to deal with conflict and competition, and because of that there were a tremendous number . . . of women launching personal attacks at other women, entirely in the political space. They were defending Hillary Clinton or they were trying to eviscerate Sarah Palin or they were mad at Michelle Obama for not looking like she was patriotic, but they were personal attacks.