In that analogy, are American women the mean girls, or is Sarah Palin the mean girl?
Both, actually. And, God this is reductive, but I think we understood, whether or not we were able to put it together at the time, that in part we got a Sarah Palin because of our inability to deal with a Hillary Clinton. That does not mean, oh, Hillary should have won. It means that Hillary as a mold-breaking, ball-busting, aggressive, relentless female candidate encountered a level of resistance from within her own party — and again, I don’t mean that she should have won, I mean that she should have been treated better, and that her historical place should have been recognized more, and it wasn’t. And so it was the limits of our tolerance, and of a Democratic tolerance for this new kind of woman — a relentless, competitive, noncompliant woman — that opened a door for McCain to bring in Palin to begin with. So you see Palin as more compliant, less competitive, less ball-busting. Well, by some standards, she was. But Palin, now, is Clinton-like in her refusal to relent at this point
