Whether Sen. John McCain and Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin prevail over the Democratic ticket—Sens. Barack Obama and Joe Biden—Palin’s legacy to this presidential campaign may be the fundamental workforce issue she raises this fall: Can a working mother occupy the second-highest office in the country?

It’s one of many HR issues she’s bringing to the fore. One of the most popular adjectives that Palin supporters use to describe her is “authentic.” She embodies a biography to which many working women can relate.

She rose from the PTA in Wasilla, Alaska, to the top of state government. She managed a family of five while holding down tough jobs along the way.

Palin is hardly a hero to all women. Fervent backers of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton are rejecting this conservative usurper who threatens to break the glass ceiling that they believe is Clinton’s divine right to shatter.

What’s interesting, though, is that questions about Palin’s ability to balance work and family have arisen across the political spectrum. Ironically, the strongest support for her on this issue has come from the family-values folks in the right wing. Conventional wisdom says that they might favor women staying at home.

The whirlwind of topsy-turvy gender politics gusted when former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani—the macho former federal prosecutor who sent mob bosses to jail—gave the most stirring defense of Palin.

“How dare they question whether Sarah Palin has enough time to spend with her children and be vice president,” he said in his convention speech Wednesday, September 3. “When do they ever ask a man that question?”

That’s true. And the societal norm of separating home and work life isn’t about to change, according to Paul Rupert, president of Rupert & Co., a flexibility-consulting firm in Chevy Chase, Maryland.

Workplace demands are pretty much the same today as they were when Palin was born in the mid-1960s.

“You go to work and you leave your family behind,” he says. “Those attitudes flow from the top of the organizations.”

Women have migrated into the workforce out of economic necessity. “This is the greatest transfer of family time in our history from the home to the office,” Rupert says. “Direct parental care has become a casualty of that change.”

Flexible work arrangements such as telecommuting, compressed workweeks and part-time work “always register in the top three or four of any survey of employee desires,” Rupert says.

But those kinds of adjustments remain out of the question at the top of the corporate food chain. If you’re in the C-suite, you’re supposed to give everything you have to the company.

A female senior HR executive at a pharmaceutical company told Rupert that she broke the glass ceiling only because she had a stay-at-home husband and a chauffeur.

Now Palin is proposing to take her family—infant son, pregnant teenage daughter and everyone in between—with her into the ultimate C-suite, the West Wing of the White House.

The working-mom debate will rage throughout the fall.

“Can you create a position that truly allows people to integrate parenting and their work?” Rupert asks. “This issue is a vital one to engage—to debate, discuss and ultimately resolve. She’s in a unique position to lay down a marker.”