“Her decision to get – and stay – involved in the race here in South Carolina was a huge boon to our campaign, because it caused a lot of South Carolinians to take a second look at a rising in the polls but once-little known state legislator who was fighting to give them back their government,” Haley spokesman Tim Pearson said of Palin…

“Governor Palin’s endorsement was integral to the success of our campaign,” Fiorina spokeswoman Julie Soderlund told POLITICO. “She provides the ‘good housekeeping seal of approval’ for conservative, outsider candidates. After earning her endorsement we saw an immediate spike in support for Carly amongst conservatives, who represent the vast majority of Republican primary voters.”

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Rachel Larimore makes great points, as always, but I differ from her slightly in that I don’t really want the wins framed as a Year of the Woman kind of thing. They didn’t win because they are women. They won for the people that they are and for the real world experience that they bring. In Whitman’s, Fiorina’s and Haley’s cases, for instance, they have actually, you know, made a payroll as opposed to living off the public sector their whole lives. Having run businesses themselves, they understand how they work, in practice and not just in theory.

However, I don’t think any woman must like them just because they are women. That plays right into old school identity politics and we need to be done with that. What I will not stand for, though, is outright sexism used to diminish these women, as is happening today with Sarah Palin. Again.

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Many women’s response to Palin’s emergence as a major political figure highlights this need for ideological diversity. Shortly after the election of 2008, at a lecture I gave at Touro College law school in Long Island, a student in her late twenties made a powerful statement about what Palin’s candidacy meant to her personally. “I’m a professional woman who is also a wife and a mom, and a pro-life, conservative Christian,’’ she said. “I have always felt that feminism did not speak to me or for me. When I saw Sarah Palin, I felt I could finally call myself a feminist, because here was a feminist like me.’’

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Via Conservatives4Palin.