Kristi Noem

TWO MOTHERS of young children are running neck-and-neck for Congress in South Dakota. Stephanie Herseth Sandlin, the Democratic incumbent who is a Georgetown law school graduate from a politically prominent family, is the mother of a two-year-old on a waiting list for daycare and Kristi Noem, the appealing state legislator who has managed to raise more than any other Republican Congressional challenger in recent months, has two teenagers and a seven-year-old. Both women promote their mommy-ness in their television ads. In this ad for Sandlin, she  is shown giving Zachary a bath. The Noem children appear in several commercials plugging for Mom. In an age of Mama Grizzlies, motherhood gives an air of down-to-earth authenticity to a candidate. The idea that young children might disqualify a woman from office is so passé no one even brings it up. To the contrary, a woman who can do all things is vital, her young children a political asset.

These two women are cut from different molds. Herseth Sandlin (her maiden name is Herseth) is a career politician and a right-leaning Democrat who supports abortion rights. Antipathy to the current Democrats is so strong in South Dakota that Herseth Sandlin is running behind Noem in recent polls. This is so even though Herseth Sandlin voted against Obamacare. Noem is a state legislator who helps run her family’s ranch, never went to college, likes to hunt and has a history of speeding on country roads. She has vowed to vote for repeal of Obamacare. Noem is articulate and extremely pretty. She comes across as genuine and serious, as if she has come to politics out of the call of duty.

She seems an idealist tied to community and family. She writes:

Running for public office was never one of my life’s goals, and I don’t view it as a career. I was born and raised in South Dakota and have spent my entire life here farming and ranching. My husband and I have chosen to raise our children in the same community where we both were raised. We won’t make Washington, D.C. our home. I will go to our nation’s capital and be South Dakota’s lone voice in the people’s House. We need a voice that speaks for the people of South Dakota and is not focused on currying favor with Nancy Pelosi and the Obama administration.”

But one wonders. What kind of conservative would leave her children? What kind of conservative would name her daughters Kassidy (sic) and Kennedy?

The Age of the Woman in politics is upon us. As neither political party rejects careerism in women, they are both likely to become much more female in the years ahead. However, no genuinely conservative female candidate would promote the feminization of politics as a good thing. A real female conservative would view politics as primarily a masculine sphere and consider herself an exception. Unfortunately, women candidates rarely refrain from feminist rhetoric. U.S. Reps. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee and Cathy McMorris Rodgers of Washington state said this week: 

Women voters are fired up for this year’s election and will most definitely not be staying home on Nov. 2, and there are at least 146 good reasons for this.

A record number of Republican women have sought federal office this year – 129 GOP women in House races and 17 in Senate races. In 1994, another record-breaking year, 91 Republican women ran for the House and 13 for the Senate. How can EMILY’s List say that the party is running women out when more and more women are running?

This is the year of the strong conservative woman, but because those women are overwhelmingly pro-life, EMILY’s List clearly doesn’t see them as good enough.

Why would conservative women favor women as candidates? On the one hand, these Republican women make the anti-abortion, anti-big government, pro-marriage woman more visible and influential. That’s good. But in their touting of women candidates as women they also embrace feminism. Besides, it takes more than idealism to be a successful politician. It takes ambition and competitiveness. Female involvement and interest in political life is a good thing. Naked female ambition is not. Running for office is not the only way conservative women can have an influence. They can serve in local communities. They can volunteer as leaders and fund-raisers. But there is hypocrisy in the idea that in order to promote conservative womanhood, women must become national leaders themselves.

                                                                        — Comments —

Steve writes:

I have to live by my principles and trust my experience. 

For the last four years, I have experienced women judges, a woman GAL (Guardian ad Litem), a woman GAL supervisor, a woman custody evaluator, a woman child protection services evaluator, three woman psychologists, a woman in charge of the “crisis center” where I see my daughters for two hrs every two weeks. Not one really cares about justice or my daughters and only cater to “what if” emotions. 

I watch female politicians trumpet family values. Baloney. I don’t care about words I watch actions and so far I have not seen women make hard choices based on justice or foresight. Most men are not much better but there is a chance. 

Given a choice between the two female main party candidates, I would vote third party only for a man. No good woman can espouse family values and then dismiss her family duty for the 16 to 20 hour days in order to campaign. 

Women base decisions on the personal rather than the general. Women choose to punish 99 innocent people rather than to inconvenience one claiming to be a victim. The historically typical man (often rare today) would rather let one guilty go free than compromise the law, which would lead to erosion and ultimate collapse of our society. Our forefathers knew the importance of the law over the rule of “men”. (“Men” meaning any woman or man, for those feminist gender neutral types, that stumble upon this post.) 

Forgotten principles and concepts are again being talked about by Judge Andrew Napolitano and Thomas Woods, Phd. Search them out on YouTube. (Both Catholic, by the way) I was recently struck by the rescues of the Chilean miners. The people on the rescue team were ALL men. Amazing! Men figured out how to solve the problem, men handled the logistics, men thought of contingencies, men worked day and night to save other men so these men could go back to their wives and children. I would do the same and follow any of these men. With no hesitation, I would die serving the principled leadership of a good man or to save the life of a good woman. 

I don’t care about professed values, I care about principles and actions. I better stop now because I feel a rant coming on. (And you thought this was a rant… LOL) God help me, I still love women.

Fred Owens writes:

If I had only heard about the Tea Party and what motivates them, I would have pictured a group of grizzled older white men leading the charge. But what I actually see is a group of fairly attractive younger women in positions of leadership. Sarah Palin, Christine O’Donnell, Nikki Haley, and Kristi Noem are, in my own subjective terms, down right pretty. [Laura writes: Kristi Noem is not a Tea Party candidate and appears to have distanced herself from Palin.]

This does not look like a return to patriarchal values, if you ask me. Do you know what happens when angry men follow a pretty young woman? Well, they stop thinking, for one thing, and they start feeling.

And do you know what men feel when they’re following the scent of a woman? All kinds of earthy jokes come to mind, but I will leave that to the imagination.

Laura writes:

I think the rise of the Pretty Politician will ultimately hurt women. Prettiness will eventually seem less pretty.

Hurricane Betsy writes:

Those two women in your article are right old-fashioned compared to the woman running for Reeve of our large rural municipality. A Reeve is a big deal, like a mayor, and it’s a full-time job. She has an important job for a utility company and just had a baby. In her family photo the baby looks to be about six months of age. But she won’t let that stop her, nosireeee. Here’s why she’d make a good Reeve:

“My experience includes creating strategic plans; negotiating with stakeholders; analyzing investment opportunities; preparing business case studies; presenting recommendations to committees; managing staff; analyzing financial statements; and preparing budgets and examining variances.”

Lord, I do that kind of stuff every day! Only I don’t know how to make it sound so…important.

Laura writes:

Ha! I do that stuff too. I just told one of my stakeholders to make his bed.

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