Palin and Bachmann: Feminists in Naughty Monkey Peep Toe Heels

Article here. Excerpt:

'Poor, poor Tim Pawlenty. The earnest Minnesota governor brought his best zingers and one-liners to the Minneapolis Convention Center on Wednesday, but he got his biggest applause at the GOP fundraiser only when he introduced Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann. The two brightest stars of the conservative movement were headliners for the event to raise cash for Bachmann's re-election campaign. On the charisma scale, he was chalk to their napalm.

With Martina McBride's "This One's for the Girls" blaring in the background, Bachmann and Palin took the stage in a blur of waving hands, teased hair, floral prints and piled-on pearls. Far away from Michael Steele's sex-club scandal and John Boehner's "Hell No!" legislative strategy, Palin and Bachmann gave their mostly female audience of more than 11,000 a riled up hour of newfangled Republican girl power.
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On health care reform, Bachmann promised to push for repeal. "You better believe it, baby! Repeal is what this girl is going to be all about after November." On federal spending, she promised to shrink it. "We're going to start by starving the beast!" On the details of all this, she sort of fudged it (the government owns or controls 51 percent of the American economy?), but that's not the point right now.
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The point is that artfully folded into the women's right-of-center red meat rhetoric was an unusually heavy dose of what anyone would call old-fashioned feminism if it wasn't coming from two hot Republican women in high heels. (Palin put Naughty Monkey-brand shoes on the map when she wore their red "Double Dare" peep-toe pumps to a John McCain rally.)

"In politics, if you want something said, ask a man. If you want something done, ask a woman," Palin joked to the delight of the crowd, quoting Margaret Thatcher. "My own mantra is that behind every good, productive man stands a very surprised woman."
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It's hard to think that Wednesday's event was not what Betty Friedan envisioned for women in "The Feminine Mystique," when she said that women should be allowed to want more than a life of folding laundry and driving carpool. "We can no longer ignore that voice within women that says: 'I want something more than my husband and my children and my home.'" she wrote.
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As Palin finished her stump speech for Bachmann, she made a prediction about the 2010 election cycle. "There are a lot of conservative women like Michele who are standing up and speaking out for common sense conservative solutions and they're ready to take their country back," she said. "2010 is shaping up to be the year that conservative women get together to take back this country and Michele is leading the stampede."'