Women ahead of their time

Before there was Sarah Palin, there was Geraldine Ferraro. Before there was Lindsey Lohan, there was Elizabeth Taylor.

Both Ferraro and Taylor died last weekend, bringing those comparisons to mind. I'll start with the second, since it seems the most unlikely.

I would not presume to compare Lohan to Taylor in terms of their impact as actresses --  that edge goes to Taylor, without question. Rather, what binds these two women of very different generations together is their notoriety.

Lindsay Lohan is just the latest celebrity figure to attract enormous attention for misbehaving. Her frequent trips to rehab centers and courtrooms have transended the entertainment pages of newspapers and the gossip shows on TV and spilled over into mainstream news.

In that sense, though, Elizabeth Taylor was way ahead of her. Taylor's very public affair with Richard Burton when both were married to other people was not only condemned by newspaper columnists and talking heads on TV, but the Pope.  Taylor, too, went to rehab for various addictions, checking in with a smile and a queenly wave of her hand.

Elizabeth Taylor hadn't had a significant movie part since the 1970s. It didn't matter. So embedded had she become in the public mind that it was enough for her merely to be Elizabeth Taylor. Similarly, Lindsey Lohan has taken on an identity quite apart from her rather limited body of on-camera work.

As for Ferraro and Palin, both of them were selected as vice-presidential candidates because the person at the top of the ticket was losing.

The 1984 Democrats, with the collective death wish sometimes displayed by both parties ("Hey, it's his turn") had nominated Walter Mondale to run against Ronald Reagan. The logic behind this is puzzling -- since Reagan had steamrollered the ticket of Jimmy Carter and Mondale four years earlier, what made them think Mondale would be any more attractive to voters in '84?

There was the sense, then, that Ferraro was named because Mondale was going to lose anyway, so why not see how a woman would do on a national ticket?

It was a little different with McCain. His race against Barack Obama wasn't quite over, but his advisors wanted to come up with something that would shake his campaign out of the doldrums. That someone was Sarah Palin -- who, if nothing else, woke everyone up.

And to her credit, Palin paid homage several times to Ferraro as a trailblazer, even though their poilitics were quite different.

“She broke one huge barrier and then went on to break many more," Palin said on the day after Ferraro's death. "The world will miss her. May she rest in peace and may her example of hard work and dedication to America continue to inspire all women.”

She said that on Facebook. Times change.