Beware the winking barracuda

The story of Sarah Palin and her bath towel reminded me of the first time I met, sort of, a woman who seemed remarkably comfortable with her appearance.

“That was nice,” I told the guy who was sitting in my passenger seat.

“What’s that?” he asked.

I was sitting at a stoplight several decades closer to my youth when she pulled up beside me in one of those small pickup trucks that was popular before Ford started selling four-door F-150s to the yuppies. I guess the motion of the vehicle suddenly appearing made me glance over, and there was one of the most attractive young women I’d seen.

It wasn’t lust. I’d read the articles in Playboy, and I knew the difference.

She looked over at me, caught my look, and smiled. I smiled back. The light turned green and I never saw her again.

It was more like a ‘thank you for noticing.’ At least that’s the way I chose to read it.

I never saw her again, so I never learned what lay behind the smile, but years later, I had a friend with a similar smile, with whom I occasionally went swimming in the river on hot summer afternoons. We talked about politics and our kids and such stuff.

Sarah Palin, I think, would not be such a friend. After watching her campaign performance and reading of her rise to becoming vice-presidential nominee, I think she had a different message when she came from her shower, wrapped only in a bath towel, to tell her briefers, both men, she would be “just a minute.”

I think she was making a statement. She was telling her male briefers she was not afraid or them, or subservient. Be not mislead, she seemed from my distant perspective to be saying, by my beauty queen experience and posture, or my blue-collar manner of speaking. I am as tough as you, and will, when this is over, use you up and toss you aside as easily as you will me.

This woman, nicknamed Barracuda by her high school mates, is comfortable in her own body. I like that, almost as much as I don’t like her divisive, power-hungry, “real American” brand of politics.

She and Todd are not done yet with their political career. Those who become distracted by her wink and her towel will find themselves bleeding, broken and discarded in the bushes outside the arena.

Generation Gap

An item in a Newsweek story: “At the GOP convention in St. Paul, Palin was completely unfazed by the boys’ club fraternity she had just joined. One night, Steve Schmidt and Mark Salter went to her hotel room to brief her. After a minute, Palin sailed into the room wearing nothing but a towel, with another on her wet hair. She told them to chat with her laconic husband, Todd. ‘I’ll be just a minute,’ she said.”

On MSNBC Wednesday, Andrea Mitchell referred to the story and seemed to chastise Palin for not putting more clothes on when she popped out to tell her male briefers she’d be “just a minute.”

It seems from here that says more about Mitchell than about Palin, and about and old generation more than young. Mitchell is 62, born and raised in a time when the thought of a woman clad less than neck to toenails was scandalous. Sarah Palin is 44, well aware of her appearance, equally comfortable in jeans or $10,000 gown.

In Mitchell’s time, a shapely young woman in a bath towel would have been advertising sexual favors for her spot on the ticket. In Palin’s, men who think “getting comfortable” means “let’s f—” are in for some serious disappointment.

The story, and its subsequent treatment, begs the question whether, had those same male briefers come in the room and John McCain appeared in his boxers, what would have been the response from the press on hearing the story.