Today’s must-read is Dana Goldstein’s article in The Daily Beast on Sarah Palin and her credibility–or lack thereof–as an advocate for disability issues. Goldstein points out that, despite Palin’s lip service to “special needs” families during the election, she has made very few substantive policy statements on disability topics. This has not gone unnoticed by disability advocates:
“Since the end of the presidential election, we haven’t heard Sarah Palin articulate any specific policy proposals [on disability],” said Peter Berns, CEO of The Arc, a Beltway lobbying group representing people with intellectual disabilities. Like nine other national disability-rights leaders The Daily Beast spoke to, Berns pointed to Palin’s excusing of Rush Limbaugh’s use of the word “retarded”—even as she hammered Emanuel, President Obama’s chief of staff, for the same sin—as evidence of her lack of seriousness. “It has unfortunately politicized the issue in ways that are not productive, and it has converted what really are bipartisan issues into partisan ones,” Berns said.
It became clear during the election that Palin was not a deep policy thinker, but it always annoyed me that the press swooned over the fact that she was a parent of a kid with Down’s Syndrome without closely examining her views on funding the services that people with disabilities need to get by in life. I don’t doubt that Palin loves her son, but I doubt she favors putting more money into Medicaid community-based services or stronger enforcement of the Americans with Disabilities Act. In fact, I doubt she’s spent enough time thinking about those issues enough to form an opinion. Palin is quick to call out perceived slights against her son and his disability, but a certain hollowness accompanies those protests because it seems that, for Palin, the disability community is a constituency of one.
Thanks again to Andrew Sullivan for the tip.
