Sarah Palin winning the 'Mommy War?'

by Mark Silva

OK, they tossed this question out there before Republican Sarah Palin was out there running for vice president - she with the five children back home in Alaska - in a contest featuring a Democratic presidential nominee, Barack Obama, with two young girls of his own in Chicago.

(Republican presidential nominee John McCain's youngest of seven from two marriages is a teenager.)

The question: "Who makes better candidates -- moms or dads?''

The Pew Research Center ran a little experiment earlier this summer, before, as they note, McCain had picked Palin and "scrambled much of the conventional political wisdom about who's on which side of the decades-old 'Mommy Wars' over the competing demands of career and motherhood.''

"The online test was designed to give respondents no indication that it was about gender or parenting status,'' Pew notes. "It found that Republicans are significantly less likely to vote for a candidate who is a mother of young children than one who is a father of young children, other factors being equal.

One in five Republicans (21 percent) said they were very likely to support a candidate for Congress who was the mother of school-aged children, while more (31 percent) said they would support a father with the identical personal and career profile.

Among Democrats, gender and parenthood appears to have had "the opposite effect,'' Pew found: Democrats significantly more likely to vote for a congreessional candidate who is the mother of small children (33 percent) than to support an identical candidate who is the father of small children (24 percent).

"Taken together,'' Pew reports, "the findings suggest women with young children pay a 'mommy penalty' among Republicans if they run for Congress. Among Democrats, by contrast, it's the fathers of small children who are at a disadvantage and it's the mothers who are more likely to be strongly supported.''

"These results echo the findings of other Pew surveys that show Republicans -- who are more likely to embrace traditional social values -- are far more troubled than Democrats by the long term trend toward mothers of young children working outside the home,'' Pew notes. "In a 2007 survey, for example, some 53 percent of Republicans described this trend as bad for society, compared with just 38 percent of Democrats who felt the same way.

"These surveys were conducted before the dramatic entrance onto the national scene of Palin, who suddenly has become the most famous working mom in the country,'' Pew adds. "The enthusiastic initial response to her candidacy -- especially among Republicans and among women -- raises an intriguing political question for the fall campaign: Might the public's long held attitudes on these "mommy wars" matters bend under the force of Palin's compelling personal saga?''