Sarah Palin's Feminist Flip-Flop

You needn't be a Rhodes scholar to be able to keep your gender philosophy straight, particularly within the period of a month or so. Yet Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin has flubbed even that, according to ABC's Political Radar:

In an interview on NBC Nightly News that aired yesterday, Brian Williams asked Palin: "Governor, are you a feminist?"

"I'm not gonna label myself anything, Brian," said Palin. "And I think that's what annoys a lot of Americans, especially in a political campaign, is to start trying to label different parts of America different, different backgrounds, different...I'm not going to put a label on myself."

But label herself is just what she did last month in an interview with CBS's Katie Couric, who asked her if she considered herself a feminist. Her answer was an unabashed, "I do."

These kinds of 180s are bad enough when they occur on major policy issues, such as federal bailouts, whether or not to cut taxes, etc. But when they occur within a short period of time and on a simpler question, it really calls into question the intelligence level of the interviewee.

By Bonnie Erbe