Actually, Jess, Michelle Obama shouldered the bulk of the parenting beginning as early as 2002, when Barack Obama—already holding an Illinois Senate seat that required regular out-of-town trips—cast his eye on what would soon be an open seat for U.S. Senate. It only got harder for her from there, as he entered a years-long stretch of incessant campaigning. Both Obamas have acknowledged that his political absences created a problem for their marriage. Michelle Obama has said that eventually she realized she didn't want to be an angry wife forever, so she set about building a network of friends (and her own mom) who could help with what was, for all intents and purposes, single parenting. Happily, for them, life in the White House has provided much more family togetherness, even as their staffers are scrambling to preserve time with their own children and spouses.

Just as you say, Obama was never seriously criticized for running—hard—for public office, often while holding down yet another public office, while his girls were little. People assume this is what male politicians do. And precisely because his wife did such a good job making sure the girls felt secure and loved, Obama was able to offer up the tableau of his family at the 2008 Democratic national convention and elsewhere, something that helped normalize a candidate with an unusual name and an exotic background in the eyes of some skeptical or confused voters. So he got to have his cake and eat it too, in the sense that he got to spend a great deal of time pursuing his political career, away from his children, and still present an image of domestic unity. Of course, the cost for him was high: He hated being away from his kids, and when he won his U.S. Senate seat, Michelle decided to keep the household in Chicago where her support network was.

So there is clearly a double standard if Sarah Palin is to be called out for outsourcing some parenting responsibility even as she assembles her kids on stage. I don't think there is any question that female politicians are judged more harshly for letting their careers create "distance" between them and their children. Conversely, that Todd Palin's hands-on caregiving could be seen as negative would be like criticizing Michelle Obama for picking up the parenting slack. And Todd has pitched in without benefit of the sort of state-sponsored paternity leave that those lucky men, and their lucky female partners, can count on in Sweden! Canned-goods fight or no canned-goods fight, I am fascinated by Todd Palin and his role in the household as well as his wife's career. The part of the Vanity Fair piece that struck me was this: "Todd hands Sarah her speech and walks her to the stage. He pokes the air with one finger. She mimes the gesture, whips around, strides on four-inch heels to stage center, and turns it on." What was that finger-poking thing? Does he support her or control her? Is it sexist to ask that? Probably. Either way, his level of paternal involvement is what any female politician of young children is going to need, to get ahead.

Even so, just as Hanna says: If Palin is going to build an entire feminist "Mama Grizzly" theory based on the argument that fierce maternal instincts qualify a woman to protect the interests of voters, then her mothering style will naturally invite scrutiny. What does she expect—to be able to have her cake and eat it, too?

While we are on the topic of political children: Caroline Giuliani, 21, appeared in court this week after being arrested for allegedly shoplifting makeup from a Manhattan Sephora store. You have to feel sorry for her, on some level: Her status as daughter of the former mayor and prosecutor and presidential hopeful is the only reason her case drew headlines. It was agreed that the charges will be dismissed if she does community service and stays out of trouble. There is no suggestion that she got preferential treatment. According to the Times, the DA's office "said it handled Ms. Giuliani’s case no differently than most involving first-time offenders accused of low-level crimes."

It's hard to ignore the irony here, though. As mayor, Rudolph Giuliani was an adherent of the "broken windows" theory of crime—the view that small offenses can lead to social mayhem, and that zero tolerance should be shown to petty lawbreakers. Yesterday's story notes that her father was not seen to be accompanying her as she left the courthouse. Probably a good thing, since today's New York prosecutors seem a tad more merciful than Giuliani, scourge of squeegee-men and turnstile jumpers, typically was when dealing with the perpetrators of, yes, low-level crimes.

Tags: Barack Obama, Caroline Giuliani, Michelle Obama, Rudy Giuliani, Sarah Palin, todd palin

A new study found more people search for the term "abortion" in red states, where policies are conservative or abortion options are limited, than in bluer states. The immediate takeaway is the argument pro-choice activists have been waiting for: limiting abortion access does not make the procedure any less in demand.

While I agree, and certainly want it to be true, it seems like a reductive and oversimplified response. It assumes anyone searching for "abortion" wants one, and it's not taking into account the very vocal anti-choice minority. (Even though 51 percent of Americans identified as pro-life last year, most haven't taken it on as a cause.)

I've searched for "abortion" often (job hazard) and there's a wash of results that are nothing but political and moral tirades. Sometimes they're even masked as "facts," like in my most recent "abortion" search. It turned up abortionfacts.com, which is copyrighted by the pro-life Heritage House, as the third result. Could it be that a good percentage of people are just searching for "abortion" to validate their strong beliefs against it?

While this discovery could be used to further investigate how women get, or don't get, abortions in underserved areas, it doesn't say much about abortion demand in red states.

This post originally appeared on TresSugar.

Related Links: Pro-Lifers Protesting Video Abortions Rehash Same Argument, 5 Laws that Bully Women Seeking Abortions

Tags: pro-choice, pro-life, red states, tressugar

The media keeps fanning the flames of the story of wrestler deaths in the WWE, the domain of Linda McMahon, who ran the wrestling empire before she became a candidate for governor in Connecticut. Here's this handy summing-up from The Week: four men and one woman dead at young ages, two of them this month. And Democratic rival Richard Blumenthal still has had nothing to say about this. No attack ads or even just a biting line or two. And meanwhile, McMahon is slashing him whenever she can. Here she is relishing the attack in talking to The Daily Beast's Lloyd Grove—and catching up to Blumenthal in the polls. She's 10 points away, which is a lot closer than the 17 points she trailed by earlier this summer. What exactly is he waiting for?

Maybe Blumenthal's campaign thinks that McMahon's dagger-and-heels style is so out of step with genteel and proper Connecticut that she will sink herself. She has a yacht called Sexy Bitch, don't forget. When Grove asked her about a TV spot from the Republican primary that showed McMahon repeatedly kicking a wrestling ref in the crotch, she quipped “Somebody said to me the other day, ‘We’re going to get you some steel-toed shoes when you get to Washington." Lovely.

But I still don't see how Blumenthal's kid glove strategy is a winner. McMahon has $50 million of her own money to define herself as the feisty challenger. She has spent less than half of it. Blumenthal risks becomes background noise if he doesn't get into the ring and kick back. Or at least throw some punches.

Tags: Connecticut governor's race, linda mcmahon, richard blumenthal

The PR template for savvy politicians has long been to cooperate with major outlets on stories, because it’s easier to control the message that way. Even if the principal won’t sit for an interview, at the very least the principal’s staff and publicist should be talking to the reporter on background, knocking down rumors and promoting a positive perception of the boss.

Michael Joseph Gross’ Vanity Fair profile of Palin, which we’ve been discussing at some length, suggests he got bupkis. “Despite many requests, neither Palin nor her current staff would comment for this article,” he writes. He goes on to describe an atmosphere of fear and closedmouthedness among those who know her, Palin’s “real and rhetorical antagonism” toward the media, her spokesperson’s habit of “barely” speaking to the press, and a media consultant who’s apparently a rather shrill “novice.” (Of course you never really know—might Palin’s staff have commented off the record? Might they have given Gross backstage access for that opening scene of her speech in Missouri?)

Is this refusal to cooperate with Vanity Fair the smart tack for Palin or the stupid one? I can think of two recent magazine articles—one on Sally Quinn’s complicated family relationships, also in Vanity Fair, and one on Newt Gingrich in Esquire, containing those ruthless quotes from his ex-wife—in which the principals cooperated on controversial stories about them. As for whether this worked in their respective favors, I’d say yes for Quinn and probably for Gingrich. (The former House speaker may have lost out on the opportunity to humanize himself by being so Newty. But I think a profile of Gingrich using only Marianne Gringrich’s quotes and no interview with the pol himself could have been even less sympathetic.)

A good deal of real and virtual ink have been spilled over the way Palin controls her public image, relying on Facebook and Twitter to get her opinions out and rarely consenting to interviews. Press accounts are often critical of her approach but also grudgingly admiring—it appears to be working. Gross writes that since resigning as governor “she has submitted to authentic, unpaid interviews with only a handful of journalists, none of whom have posed notably challenging questions. … She injects herself into the news almost every day, but on a strictly one-way basis, through a steady stream of messages on Twitter and Facebook. The press plays along.”

And yet, I wonder if, had her people worked more closely than they apparently did with Vanity Fair, they might have shed some skeptical light on the shotgun wedding anecdote that Rachael and David Weigel and Ben Smith find questionable. Rachael also wonders about an account in which Sarah and Todd Palin threw canned goods at each other until the fridge “looked like it had got shot up with a shotgun.” Here’s the anecdote from a “friend” of the Palins that I found myself wondering about: “Once, while Sarah was preparing for a city-council meeting, she said, ‘I’m gonna put on one of my push-up bras so I can get what I want tonight.’ ”

Wow. Just, wow. A savvy press shop would cooperate with a reporter precisely for the opportunity to respond to an anecdote of this sort. You already know the potential rejoinders: a) It didn’t happen, b) Palin doesn’t remember whether it happened, c) Palin confesses that she may have once said something like this— in jest.

Instead, the story just hangs there, shocking in its brazenness, confirming Palin-haters’ most disdainful assumptions.

Tags: esquire, marianne gingrich, Michael Joseph Gross, Newt Gingrich, Sally Quinn, Sarah Palin, Vanity Fair

Hanna and Jessica, I can’t decide whether the accounts in the Vanity Fair piece of Sarah Palin parading her children around at rallies and leaving Todd with the childrearing duties are sexist or just the sneering that is typical in most profiles of Palin by what she would refer to as the “lamestream media.” Such anecdotes usually seem pointless to me, because, let’s face it, there are very few people who are neutral about Sarah Palin. You love her or you hate her.  And so a profile that starts with her kids being ignored backstage while she’s giving a speech (and of course the quotes are full of Palin saying goin’ and gonna and tell ‘em) merely affirms to Palin haters that the woman is a vile hypocrite and further convinces her supporters that the coastal elite have a grudge against her—and by extension, against them.

And in this case, that actually serves to undermine Michael Joseph Gross’ piece. Which is too bad, because there is some fascinating information in there. When he finally gets done dishing on how terrible Palin is to her staffers and reporting on how she always gives the same speech (are there many politicians who don’t), he talks about NorthStar Strategies, a company run by a Palin confidant, PAL-PAC, which  “seems to have been created for a single purpose: to pay Sarah Palin to give a speech” and some other strange financial arrangements

If Gross wanted to expose Palin’s secretive and/or shady business dealings, that might have been a provocative and informative piece. Jessica, you wrote that you “applaud Gross for calling Sarah Palin out on her endless fibbing.” Unfortunately, because he couldn’t resist the temptation to go for the easy digs at Palin, his piece is also full of gossipy bits that have been proven untrue, as David Weigel pointed out on his blog yesterday, and other accounts that are hard to believe (like the canned-goods-tossing fight between Sarah and Todd that left the refrigerator looking like it got hit with a shotgun). And so now Palin can label this piece a “hatchet job,” which is only going to make her more popular with her base.

Tags: Sarah Palin, Vanity Fair, Vanity Fair profile of Sarah Palin

Amanda, there’s an entirely different way of looking at that study about young women living in cities earning more than men. Yes, they are a cultural elite—young, educated women under 30 living in big metropolitan areas. But they are also a vanguard. Change always comes first to young educated women living in big cities, and then the rest of the country follows. The main engine fueling this change—the fact that for every two men graduating from college, three women will do the same—is not going to change anytime soon, which suggests that the next many waves of educated women will also outearn men. And the men are not picking up the hint."This generation [of women] has adapted to the fundamental restructuring of the American economy better than their older predecessors or male peers," says James Chung, author of the study published in Time. Or as he also puts it: The women are "clocking" the men.

This is not your dad’s economy anymore. That scenario you describe: women becoming secretaries while men become car mechanics and plumbers and eventually outearn them—just isn’t happening anymore. Women are becoming managers while men are becoming unemployed plumbers and car mechanics.

As for what happens when women get married and have babies: That tragic life scenario is having a lot less of a dent on their earning potential than it used to. Women get married and have children later, and by the time they do, they have a lot more leverage to dictate the terms of their future work—particularly the kinds of women this study covers. It really is not 1982 anymore. If the panicked sexist response is outdated, so is the wary feminist one.

Tags: young women outearn men

There’s been much ado here over the past few days about Vanity Fair’s musings on Sarah Palin’s exploitative parenting techniques. Of course this isn’t the first time Palin’s private life has been hauled out into the public square for taunting. Perhaps you remember Bristol’s pregnancy?

To bring kids into the political game or to not? That’s the question. And it’s sprung up again today, this time in the Minnesota governor’s race. A local weekly paper, City Pages, has just published some incriminating Facebook pictures of GOP gubernatorial candidate Tom Emmer’s 20-year-old son, Tripp. The photos show Tripp partying and drinking last year at the very not-legal age of 19, and posing—with a thumbs-up—next to a passed-out girl who was kindly given some Sharpie penis drawings on her face and arm. Normally, this would all just point to the not very salacious fact that Tripp is one of those backwards hat-wearing, power-drinking, fratty teens, but the problem is this: Dad Tom Emmers has been convicted of two DWIs as an adult and has also championed reduced penalties for drunk drivers. Tripp, his son, pleaded guilty to underage drinking less than two months ago. Just like Bristol’s pregnancy highlighted the hypocrisy of Palin’s pro-abstinence stance, in Emmer’s case, too, the personal is political.

Tripp’s Facebook profile also lists an unfortunate saying by Dad in the Favorite Quote section: “Don’t Blow Your Wad In First Period-- Thomas Emmer, Jr.” But, hey, look on the bright side-- he’s quoting his Dad on Facebook! Surely the GOP can spin that as evidence of a close-knit family.

Tags: City Pages, Sarah Palin, Tom Emmer, Tripp Emmer

We've noted before that the NYT has a tendency to run multiple stories on the same topic within the same brief time frame, suggesting that sometimes, the Times' left hand isn't reading what the right hand is writing. This morning, the Business section has a lengthy piece on the dangers of prescribing psychosis drugs for young children, profiling a boy with "severe temper tantrums" who was prescribed a substantial cocktail: the antipsychotic Risperdal, the antidepressant Prozac, two sleeping medicines, and one for attention-deficit disorder, beginning at 18 months and all before the age of three. It's a cautionary tale, wherein the mother—who was young, inexperienced, and desperate (in fact, you might say the doctors were prescribing to meet the mother's needs, not the child's)—realizes that her child's personality was completely subsumed in medication, that ends in a happy first grader on a relatively normal regimen of only one drug for an attention deficit.

Contrast that with this weekend's NYT magazine article on depression in preschool-age children, which must have left more than a few anxious readers wondering whether their child was depressed and whehter early intervention might help. The article notes that research doesn't support the use of antidepressants in young children, but quotes several doctors as fearing that a new clinical diagnosis of preschool depression would result in a further rise of off-label prescribing: exactly the kind of thing that today's article cautions against. Those doctors favor using more amorphous terms like "adjustment disorder with depressed mood" and "depressive disorder not otherwise specified" to avoid labeling a child and, not incidentally, to avoid encouraging the easy solutions implied by antidepressants. But Dr. Jane Luby, the professor and researcher whose work in support of creating such a diagnosis was a focus of the article, suggests that as many as 84,000 preschoolers could be clinically depressed. That's a decent number of new customers for the pharmaceutical companies. As one child psychologist told the Times, speaking of "frustrated drug-industry representatives:" “They want to give these kids medicines, but we can’t figure out the diagnoses.”

As Helaine pointed out yesterday, Dr. Luby, who'd like to hand them that diagnosis, has accepted money  from "Johnson & Johnson, Shire and AstraZeneca to study using atypical antipsychotics in young children," a fact that the New York Times' story didn't mention even in passing. This morning's piece, focused on off-label use of medications, didn't refer back to Dr. Luby, either or suggest that while we should fear off-label overprescribing of antipsychotics, we should also carefully examine anything that might encourage the creation or marketing of additional drugs specifically for children. It should have. An extra burden of disclosure and thoroughness comes with being a paper (and magazine) with as much influence as the Times.

The takeaway for parents seems obvious: Think twice about accepting or encouraging a doctor to prescribe medication for your child. But this is a question of far more than individual importance. The preschoolers in the Sunday magazine article aren't being medicated for their still theoretical depression; they and their parents are receiving therapy and instruction in handling "depressive symptoms," like motion regulation, stress management, and guilt reparation. It's hoped that the therapy will literally change the way their brains operate. But therapy is more expensive, difficult and time consuming than medication, and it always has been. In noting the educational level and existing parenting efforts of the parents of the children profiled, author Pam Paul inadvertently highlights one of the dangers of creating a new, and prescribable, category of clinically depressed preschoolers: The middle-class kids will get therapy. Other kids—poorer, born to younger or less able parents or to parents who need their children to be manageable enough to remain in day care—will get medication.

As this morning's Times noted, children from low-income families—like Kyle, the child profiled for that article—are four times more likely to be prescribed antipsychotic medications than those with private insurance. It's not enough to take care of our own children, and to put down the Sunday Times magazine wondering if our own delicate little hothouse flowers might need a little therapy now to help prevent a lifetime on the couch. What we should really focus on is whether kids like Kyle need protection now in order to prevent a lifetime on antipsychotics. We expect pharmaceutical companies to create and market new drugs. We even expect researchers studying mental health to study all therapeutical options, even those that might include medication. But we expect the Times to look at those things with caution, and to raise the obvious ethical concerns that surround any meeting between the two. Big Pharma and Dr. Luby are doing their jobs. The Times, in this case, was not.

Tags: anxiety in children, bipolar children, child mental health, mental illness in children

Time trolls for panicked sexist responses with a headline that really seems too good to be true: "Workplace Salaries: At Last, Women On Top."  Of course, as you read on in the article, you find out that, yes, women are making 8 percent more than men ... as long as they don't age past 30, don't get married, don't have children, and get more education than their male peers. Oh yeah, and if they live in 147 of the largest 150 cities in the country.

But let's not say this isn't progress. When I was growing up, my dad said, "You're a woman, so you'll have to work twice as hard to get half as far as a man." (Conservative folks can get suddenly feminist when it's their own children's futures on the table.) Little did he know that as long as I stayed under 30 (whoops, too late), I could actually work twice as hard and do 8 percent better! Clearly, feminism has gone too far.

What seems to be exciting news of women catching up on the surface is sadly not that exciting at all. The main reason that this tiny demographic of women does better than their male peers can be chalked up to the fact that women tend to finish college at higher rates than men. And the reason is that women don't have as much access to the kind of jobs that don't require a college degree but still will end up providing a decent salary over the long term. Young women taking on administrative jobs while some of their male peers go into car repair, fire fighting, or plumbing will initially earn more money, but their wages will often stagnate as their male peers get promotions after going through an apprenticeship phase.

And that's before you even factor in marriage and children. We still live in a society where women are expected to obsess about the work/life balance, and men often don't even know what that phrase means. I can say from experience that it's true that being an unmarried, childless woman is a big boost toward being treated like you're closer to a man in our culture. I, too, have experienced the pleasure of looking blankly at people who ask me how I manage the work/life balance. After all, my cats are happy to sit at my feet and beg for treats whether I'm engaging in my work life on the computer or taking the occasional dip into "life," i.e., watching the latest A&E drama or cooking something. No one is feeling neglected when I work all the time. Men can count on someone else handling all that "life" stuff for them, but women can approximate male privilege by simply not having any of that "life" stuff putting demands on their time.

Tags: education gap, pay equity

—Unmarried, childless women under 30 who live in cities now earn more than their male counterparts. [Time]

—In Tony Blair’s new memoir, the former prime minister refuses to apologize for joining the war in Iraq or taking his time in the loo. [Washington Post]

—The Center for Reproductive Rights’ new report on trends in state abortion restrictions reveals a disturbing uptick in anti-choice legislation. [Feministe]

—All across the Internet, flat-chested women are coming together to take pride in their minimal assets. [New York Times]

—The Democratic Republic of Congo lives up to its unofficial title of “rape capital of the world” as rebels rape 240 women, children, and babies during a recent incident in the eastern region of the country. [BBC News]

Tags: we're talking about