Last week, Swift's spokesman, Jason Kauppi, informed the New York Times that the acting governor had discussed -- while in bed -- a proposed tax on cigarettes, as well as legislation to pay for road and bridge projects around the state.

"She is resting, she has her feet up," said Kauppi, "but as she would tell you, her brain is still working."

One hears very few specifics about Swift's brain or, for that matter, her position on roads, bridges, cigarettes, the economy or the earned-income tax credit. The organ one hears most about is her uterus (and her breasts, which she may or may not be using to feed her children; next question, please). One also hears quite a lot about her position in the hospital (on her back).

Nevertheless, Swift is a national figure, and has been one ever since 1998, when she declared her candidacy for the lieutenant governorship of Massachusetts three weeks before giving birth to her first daughter. Her fame (one might say infamy) only increased when a state ethics panel found her guilty of having created the appearance of impropriety for allowing (or perhaps requiring) aides to babysit for her daughter.

Think of how strange this is: Certainly, Swift is not the first mother elected to public office. And it is practically a requirement of all American political candidates to be married with children. (Our "family values" demand it.) She's certainly not the only public figure to have to balance the demands of her job with a trip to the hospital (consider the famous maladies suffered by Ronald Reagan, Rudy Giuliani and Dick Cheney, to name a few) or even with parental leave (Tony Blair, anyone?). So what, exactly, is the national news value of a pregnant governor in Massachusetts?

Swift is not famous for her status as a politician (pop quiz: Name the lieutenant governors of Connecticut and Rhode Island), but rather for having the audacity to combine pregnancy and parenting and politics. And, given that she is a public figure, we all feel free to speculate about her private life with impunity, to use her as a blank slate on which we can project all our cultural anxieties about motherhood, gender and power.

And project we have. Swift's public persona has been commandeered to prove any number of (contrary and contradictory) points about women who work: from feminist ("Look, girls, you too can grow up to be a governor and and a mommy!") to anti-feminist ("Women want it all and they don't care what they have to sacrifice to get it -- even if the price is their children's well-being!").

Child-free advocates, such as Elinor Burkett, author of "Baby Boon," would undoubtedly see Gov. Swift as prima facie evidence that breeders in the workplace will exploit any resources they can, even if it means soliciting the unpaid labor of junior staff. Even working women have felt squeamish about embracing a woman whose alleged abuses of power could hurt their cause. (One such woman is writer Martha Ackmann, who chastised Swift in Salon last year after news of the babysitting scandal made national headlines.)

Swift is all of these and none of these. She is nobody's role model. She is such an infuriating, contradictory character that she shifts the very definition of the terms "feminist," "anti-feminist," "mother" and "politician." She is an outcast that no one wants to claim. Her circumstances turn ordinary motherhood into spectacle: She is our own pregnant pariah.

Order "Mothers Who Think: Tales of Real-Life Parenthood" from the editors of Mothers Who Think.