i noticed right off that they were using hockey mom and wondered how it so easily seemed to replace soccer mom. i assume soccer's far more ubiquitous since a lot less expensive to play. one thing the author fails to mention, and you don't get the irony until the end when he fails to mention it, Palin was b-ball star in high school. He tries to contrast her to today's young women, players. But this falls flat since she *was* a player.
maybe she and obama could face off at b-ball while mccain and biden play a game of bingo or shuffleboard or something?
i also found it interesting to learn that the pit bull comment has a fuller context and was first uttered in 2004:
http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/tv/authors/steven_wells/index.html Palin the 'hockey mom' is just an exercise in political branding
Soccer is far more popular than hockey in US these days, but the Republican party still see it as foreign and profoundly anti-American
Steven Wells
September 5, 2008 5:19 PM
When gnarled former PoW John Sidney McCain III announced Alaska governor Sarah Palin as his running mate, we were introduced to a new and instantly ubiquitous phrase - "hockey mom".
Oh sure, those two words have probably been co-joined millions of times before. "Can you drive me to hockey, mom?" for instance. It's not like we're talking "shove-ha'penny" and "daschund" here.
But this was something new. This was a cold-bloodedly deliberate attempt at political branding. Palin referred to herself a hockey mom in her carefully scripted and vetted acceptance speech - and not for the first time. In 2004 she boasted: "It's said the only difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull is lipstick. So with lipstick on, the gloves come off."
This is a deliberate political coinage. The question being, why? And how exactly does a hockey mom differ from a soccer mom (a phrase that's been around since at least 1983 but became a political cliché during the 1996 presidential election when it was widely used to describe suburban white women who voted for Bill Clinton).
Philadelphia Weekly writer and hardcore soccerphobe Brian McManus thinks there is no difference. Soccer and hockey moms are the "same exact thing, only she's from Alaska and they don't play soccer there. They play hockey." His colleague Dan McQuade agrees: "It's too fucking cold to play soccer in Alaska."
But extensive research - by which I mean typing the words "soccer" and 'Alaska" into Google - revealed this assumption to be utter rubbish.
So given that in Alaska soccer moms outnumber both the timber wolf and the caribou - what message was Palin trying to send by twisting the stereotype?
"A hockey mom is more American," says Philadelphia columnist Liz Spikol. "A lot of Americans are suspicious of soccer, and still believe it connotes the foreign. Whereas hockey is as GOP-North American as a fetus on posterboard."
She has a point. The soccer mom has mutated out of her political pigeonhole. In the lexicon of hipsters looking for an easy bourgeois icon to bash, the soccer mom has become an SUV-driving, road-hogging, sweatpants-wearing, latte-sipping, brat-spewing, strip mall-shopping, suburban folk devil.
To others she's become lazy shorthand for white, middle-class heteronormativity. In the hit TV series Weeds the suburban drug dealer heroine is repeatedly referred to as a soccer mom - despite the fact that, when seen at her son's game in the first episode, she clearly believes that a match is comprised of four quarters.
So why has the Republican candidate for vice-president worked so hard at branding herself with the hockey mom label? Of course it might simply be that she's genuinely immersed in ice-hockey culture. The thug who impregnated her 17-year-old daughter (and who described himself as "a fucking redneck" on his MySpace page) certainly is.
"I live to play hockey," he writes. 'Ya fuck with me I'll kick [your] ass'"
And there, I think - in a sweary nutshell - is the reason Palin is so keen to be seen as a hockey mom. In the minds of the effete conservative elite who run the Republican party, the hockey-playing yob who got Palin's daughter pregnant represents an idealised form of American masculinity - unthinking, brutish, willfully ignorant, easy to manipulate, unquestioningly patriotic, proudly reactionary, quick to respond to any perceived threat with overwhelming violence - and very unlikely to ever vote Democrat. Or - by extension - play soccer.
For the weird truth is that while millions more Americans play and watch soccer than play and watch hockey, millions of Americans stills see hockey as the more American sport.
In the big cities - especially in California and the liberal north-east - soccer shirts now outnumber all other sports related streets wear gear (on non-match days, at least). In Philadelphia - a city that prides itself on its gritty, down-to-earth, parochial fan culture - a stroll around Center City on any Saturday afternoon shows evidence of the massive inroads cosmopolitan soccer culture has made into the American psyche. And it isn't just the shirts, or the soccer decals on every other car-arse. Soccer is everywhere in popular culture - the default choice whenever a movie or TV show needs a scene set at a sports event.
But there remains a brutish, ignorant, xenophobic rump who regard soccer as effete, foreign and profoundly anti-American. And they are of course overwhelmingly attracted to the Republican party. For these die-hards soccer is emblematic of an imagined anti-American liberal (and, whisper it, Jewish) enemy-within out to undermine "real" American culture.
And then there's the sport of ice hockey. Despite the fact that in both ice-hockey and soccer one of the most eagerly anticipated scenes is that of players slapping at each other ineffectually (ice hockey players because they're wearing pads and skates, the soccer players because all their muscles are in their legs and, besides, they've done nothing but play soccer since they were five and so never learned to fight properly), in the minds of what passes for the Republican intelligentsia, the two sports are worlds apart. Hockey is unpretentious, hardscrabble, working class and white. While soccer is French and gay.
In the TV series Rescue Me - about unashamedly macho firefighters coming to terms with both post-9-11 trauma and their role in an increasingly feminised America, Dennis O'Leary and his super tough buddies are amateur ice hockey players. Of course they are. Had they been soccer players, at least a third of Americans would have been confused.
Waidaminnit, what are they saying here? That 9-11 turned these guys gay?
Of course, Palin misreads and underestimates both America and Americans; Republicans always do. On the train home from Philly today the three seats in front of me were filled with teenage field-hockey players - just part of the latest generation of women freed from spectating and cheerleading by America's awesome equality-of-sports-funding legislation, Title IX.
There are conservative Americans who would no doubt find these confident, cocky, assertive teenagers un-womanly and uncouth (and some conservative readers of this blog too. I'm thinking particularly of the reader who described Philadelphia's amazing female "alleycat" bike racers as "extremely unattractive, damaged, self-hating, aggressive femiNazis/lesbians.")
But they're crazy and wrong. These women look empowered, relaxed, athletic and totally in control. And they're America's next crop of young female voters. Not soccer moms. Not hockey moms. But players.