Sarah Palin has set off a new round of political fisticuffs in the “Mommy Wars” and in the Culture Wars. How could a newcomer and her pregnant teenage daughter do all that in a mere six days on the national scene?
Perhaps it was inevitable that any woman selected, that is — any woman selected on a Republican ticket — would be subjected to inquiries about how she is going to manage domestic responsibilities.
Five kids of her own and a grandchild on the way simply provided the pretext for the media’s new found attention for a candidate’s familial responsibilities. How is Barack Obama attending to his young daughters? No one would dream to ask. But the McCain-Palin team is getting grilled on just this topic.
Columnists in the mainstream media, who ordinarily would not dare to question the premise that mothers should be able to work and aspire to successful careers, are now the parental police, probing into how it is Palin will attend to her duties as a mother. Social conservatives meanwhile have been cast in the unusual role of defending a non-stay-at-home mom and fending off suggestions that Palin should — how did Hillary Clinton put it? — stay in the kitchen and bake cookies.
The fascinating thing that I hear is the number of so-called “Liberal women” who suddenly decided that the mother of children is too busy raising her children to be able to serve in public office … of course that does not apply to women who sleep with their bosses and write columns.
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