I'm a Mommy, Make Me Senator!

You may have not have noticed when it happened (there was no announcement, no fanfare, no constitutional amendment I know of), but the qualifications for women seeking higher office have changed: motherhood is now considered experience on par with, say, elective office or any other professional experience.

It started at least as far back as 1992 when Patty Murray won her Washington state Senate seat campaigning as just a "mom in tennis shoes."

The progeny-as-experience argument was back in the news when Barbara Boxer grilled Condi Rice over military casualties in Iraq in January 2007: the California senator said the childless Secretary of State had no "personal price" to pay in the war.

Then a year and a half later Sarah Palin paraded her brood (and soon-to-be grandbrood) on the campaign trail, as supporters like Fred Thompson touted her "experience not only in politics but in life ... She's a mother of five."

And now comes Caroline Kennedy, who brings her experience "as a mother, as a woman, as a lawyer" -- in that order. (She's also extremely wealthy, or just a "mom in Manolos.")

Am I willing to dismiss her motherhood as experience? Of course not. I plan to walk outside at some point today -- and I'd rather not be castrated by an angry gang of knife-wielding stay-at-homes. (In that sense I'm no different than any of the other male TV or print journalists who have yet to question the "mommy" credential.)

But is having kids an unqualified qualification? If it were, the RNC and DNC talent scouts better hightail it to the YFZ Ranch, because those ladies are really qualified.

Let's face it, there are good mommies and there bad mommies. If we're going to include motherhood as experience, then we need to make sure we're electing a competent, reputable, good mommy.

We need transparency. To that end I propose the following measures so that voters can evaluate Caroline Kennedy's performance as mother:

• - Report cards for Kennedy's three children for the last ten years.
• - Footage of the family eating dinner: how are the kids' table manners? how do they talk to each other?
  
• - Bedroom inspections: have the kids been taught to clean up after themselves?
• - Sit-down interviews with each of the kids for their candid thoughts on their mother's child-rearing.

This vetting is hardly failsafe: the kids, after all, have a father. And who's to say which parent is responsible for the Kennedy-Schlossberg kids' best qualities? But some vetting is better than none at all.

What do you think? Is being a mother a qualification for higher office? What other mommy vetting measures would you add to the list above?

And what about the guy who had the baby last year? Is he extra qualified?