Harvard Business Review

Motherhood may well turn out to be Sarah Palin's Achilles heel.

In the days since her selection as the Republican Vice Presidential pick, much has been made of her inexperience and lack of credentials on the foreign policy front, but her candidacy may be more compromised by what this hockey mom stands for on the parenting front.

Despite her support among conservatives, right wing women are up in arms, voicing their disapproval of Palin's choices as a working mom. "She was back at work when her baby was just three days old. What kind of example does this set the nation?" fumed one woman interviewed by Fox News. In another interview a woman threw out an angry question: "Who's looking after baby Trig? I don't see how a mother-of-five can run for national office and not neglect her children."

If Palin can't deliver for right wing women, she clearly can't deliver for the mainstream.
What middle class and working class women want more than anything else this election season is help juggling work and family. In battleground states like Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania working families are squeezed as never before by rising gas prices, falling house values, stagnant wages and job insecurity. Wives and mothers are working harder to make up lost ground--working longer hours, taking on a second job. There are more latchkey kids in Flint, Pittsburgh, and Youngstown than ever before. In hurting communities right across the nation, there's a crying need for after-school programs, affordable daycare, paid parenting leave, and flexible work arrangements.

Palin can't deal with this family support agenda. Positioned as she is on the far right of the political spectrum, she's constrained by an ideological commitment to minimal government. Publicly-funded daycare, state-mandated paid parenting, and rights to flextime are simply not policies she can get behind because they require an activist government ready to plow public funds into family support.

Which opens the way for Barack Obama.

To date the Obama/Biden campaign has failed to highlight the needs of working parents.If you go on the campaign website and read the fine print you can find a list of policy proposals. But so far this list has been on the back burner. It's time to move it up front.

In 1991 I wrote a book entitled When the Bough Breaks: The Cost of Neglecting our Children. It won the Robert Kennedy Memorial Book prize and was rushed into bookstores the final weeks of Bill Clinton's Presidential campaign. At heart this book was a call to action--an attempt to focus the energies of the new President on America's overloaded working families. After twelve years of Reagan and Bush --and laissez faire economics--children were failing to thrive. Problems of stagnant wages, absentee parents, and latchkey kids were no longer confined to the poorest communities, they reached deep into the mainstream. They belonged to "us" and well as to "them."

I like to think this book made a modest difference--helping ensure that FMLA was one of first acts of a new Clinton administration that went on to create significant supports for working families.

2008 feels a whole lot like 1991. After eight years of George W Bush--and another dose of laissez faire economic--families with children are again hurting. Consider one figure. Today in six million American homes two adults hold four jobs in order to get by--to pay the rent, buy the groceries, and keep that tank filled with gas. These four paycheck couples need something more substantial than the McCain/Palin agenda.

So here's over to you, Barack Obama. Lean on Hillary Clinton (who knows this stuff cold and is extraordinarily committed) and come up with the goods for working moms.

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