In the past month, more than a dozen people have asked me what I think about Senator McCain’s choice of Governor Palin as a vice presidential candidate. I don’t mean that in the course of normal conversation, people have asked me what I think about the presidential election: Instead, acquaintances have made a beeline toward me in social settings and asked, rather fiercely, “Are you ready to be president?”

“You have five kids,” they say. “One of them is a baby. Do you think you could do it?” How amusing.

They are asking me this, presumably, because I am the only person they know with five children. Does a woman who just had her fifth child have the time to run the country, they ask.

I’m not convinced that by virtue alone of having five children, I’m in a superior position to be making this assessment. But I can say that the adjustment to your first child, compared to the adjustment to your fifth, is similar to the contrast between the way you might have responded to receiving your first 25-page paper assignment in college, and the way your responded to your last.

During your first semester of college, this kind of task most likely produced a great deal of anxiety. You might have begun your paper weeks before it was due. You diligently researched the subject, took notes, made outlines, completed a few drafts, and then turned in the final product.

Your last paper, four years later, was a breeze. You might have only started it a few days before it was due. It probably took a small fraction of the time and emotional energy your first effort took to complete, yet the odds are that the process was far more efficiently and competently managed. (As for the comparison between the finished products — the essays and the children — the analogy doesn’t seem quite as apropos, but since I’m already drawing analogies, first children remind me of first pancakes off the griddle, if you know what I mean.)

The fact that Mrs. Palin has five children, including a baby with Down syndrome, is not a weighty factor in my assessment of who I will vote for in November; nor is the fact that she believes in abstinence education while her daughter, Bristol, clearly could have used a little sex education; nor do I really care about Mrs. Palin’s wonderfully appealing assessment that her “family has the same ups and downs as any other.” Is this really what Americans are thinking about when they are trying to figure out whom to support?

The 2008 election is between Mr. McCain and Senator Obama. It is about our country’s national security. It is about our economy. It is about immigration and energy, education and health care. It is about leadership. This election is between a centrist with a long track record that includes reaching across the aisle, and a liberal with a short track record.

Not to say that my identity as a mother won’t impact my vote. When I step into the voting booth in November, I believe that I will be acting, first and foremost, as a parent. But our country faces much greater and graver issues than sex education, evolution, or even abortion rights.

Try as I might, I don’t know what Mr. Obama stands for on many of the issues that are important to me. I also find his longtime relationship with the Reverend Jeremiah Wright disgraceful — only topped by the distortions and lies he comfortably broadcast when it was ultimately clear that he had no other choice than to distance himself from the vitriolic reverend. Ditto for his association with and subsequent disassociation from terrorist Bill Ayers, known for his membership in the anti-Vietnam War “Weather Underground” group.

For someone who casts himself as an open-minded thinker, Mr. Obama has a voting record that’s as homogeneous as can be. In his short career, he has consistently been one of the most liberal, if not the most liberal, senators in Washington. What’s so revolutionary about that?

What surprises me most is that nearly all of the discussions concerning the election steer clear of the issues that really matter. It’s easy to talk about Mrs. Palin, but Messrs. McCain and Obama’s choice of vice presidential candidates served one purpose, and one alone — winning. It is who they choose to advise them when no one’s paying attention that matters. It is the ideological prism through which they see the world that we are choosing between.

Maybe it’s because I have five children that I don’t have the patience or time to hear about Mrs. Palin’s love for hunting, or Senator Biden’s loquaciousness. To be brutally honest, I really don’t even care about Mrs. Palin’s special-needs child or Mr. Biden’s tragedy. Will our country be better served with a centrist or liberal commander in chief? That’s the only question that matters.

sarasberman@aol.com