“we’re not going to get into discussing her religion,” said the spokeswoman

The New York Times on Sarah Palin's religious views.

Also in the New York Times, here someone talking about women and politics. It's well worth reading:

"One of the worst poisons of the American political climate right now, the thing that time and again in recent years has led us to disaster, is the need people feel for leaders they can “relate” to."

And:

"Why does this woman – who to some of us seems as fake as they can come, with her delicate infant son hauled out night after night under the klieg lights and her pregnant teenage daughter shamelessly instrumentalized for political purposes — deserve, to a unique extent among political women, to rank as so “real”?"