When President Obama announced plans to give a speech to the nation’s schoolchildren in September, it set off a frenzy among conservative commentators who deemed it, in the words of Florida Republican Party Chairman Jim Greer, an attempt to “indoctrinate America’s children to his socialist agenda.”

Now, with the release of Katharine DeBrecht’s latest children’s book, “Help! Mom! Radicals are Ruining My Country!” — which lampoons senior Democratic members of Congress, including Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California and House Financial Services Chairman Barney Frank of Massachusetts — it is liberals’ turn to cry foul about the partisan poisoning of impressionable young minds.

The book is the fourth in DeBrecht’s series of “Help! Mom!” books. She first made a splash in 2005 with “Help! Mom! There Are Liberals Under My Bed!” which generated press attention and still sells well. “Hollywood’s in My Hamper” and “The 9th Circuit Nabbed the Nativity,” have not fared as well in the rankings.

DeBrecht’s books are at the forefront of a growing trend toward ideologically driven children’s fare and partisan publications in general in the past couple of years, book industry observers say.

“There’s always been children’s books about the political process, and in some cases even with a clear point of view,” said Kathleen T. Horning, director of the Cooperative Children’s Book Center at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. But “the ones we saw starting about two years ago were really something different,” she said. They “demonstrated a mean-spiritedness that we don’t typically see in picture books for children.”

Such publications have come from both ends of the political spectrum and tend to use satire that is directed more toward adults than children, Horning says. “I can’t imagine any child sitting still for any of the books.”

Mainstream publishers stay away from openly partisan children’s books, said Rebecca Miller, spokeswoman for the Children’s Book Council, an association for youth-oriented trade book publishers. “They tend to not want to be so polarizing.”

World Ahead Publishing, which is owned by an arm of the conservative World Net Daily, has no such qualms, having published DeBrecht’s first three books as well as many conservative tomes. “To the best of my knowledge they really invented” the genre, Miller said.

The source for liberal children’s books is not nearly so centralized. One of the most famous, “Why Mommy is a Democrat,” was self-published.

It’s not entirely surprising that there is a more organized alternative publishing operation on the right, which views the publishing world with much the same suspicion as it does the mainstream media. To wit: The synopsis of DeBrecht’s first book on BarnesandNoble.com laments that libraries and classrooms are “filled with overtly liberal children’s books advocating everything from gay marriage to marijuana use.”

Horning said books such as the “Help! Mom!” series are also part of a bigger surge in political books aimed at the youth market issued during the 2008 campaign. Simon and Schuster released a trio of biographical picture books on last year’s most prominent presidential candidates, Democrats Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama and Republican John McCain .

Other examples include the 2006 children’s book by the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy , D-Mass., written from the point of view of one of his dogs, and former Vice President Al Gore’s young reader’s edition of “Our Choice: How We Can Solve the Climate Crisis,” out this month.

Ultimately, said Horning, if children grow up in the sort of highly political households that would purchase partisan books, the literature itself probably won’t have much additional impact on their ideology.