Experienced

A case for Sarah Palin having more foreign policy experience than Joe Biden. [Link]

Would you trust Sarah Palin to negotiate with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad without preconditions?

Well, why not?

Palin came into the governor's office and found a mess on her desk. The oil deal struck by defeated Republican governor Frank Murkowski wasn't working. Through creative accounting by big oil and ambiguous reporting standards, the Murkowski plan just wasn't giving the State of Alaska the pay-off that was expected. So the former mayor of Wasilla (population 9,000, as the MSM always points out) demanded that the agreement be renegotiated and the terms be nailed down. They laughed when she sat down to negotiate, but in the end she had a new deal that delivered 50 percent of the oil revenues to the Alaska Permanent Fund, and enabled Palin to send a check for $1,200 to every qualified Alaskan citizen.

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SO HOW DOES the experience of Sarah Palin stack up against the experience of Joe Biden? There are some people who confuse seniority in the Senate with experience. In the Senate you get to be Chairman of something or other if you sit around long enough until all those with higher seniority pass out of the picture. Merit has nothing to do with it. That's how Biden got to be chairman of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Most people don't realize that the SFRC is one of the dustier corners of the Senate, largely populated with snoozing Rhodes Scholars, UN-firsters, and people who intuitively know how to pronounce the name of Kyrgyzstan and how to use it in a sentence. Occasionally someone gets on the committee who is more interested in American relations with other countries, rather than their foreign relations with us, and that wakes up the committee. Usually, ambitious politicians go elsewhere. The committee's main business is to pass the Foreign Relations act, which authorizes money for the State Department and its overseas operations. Occasionally, a treaty wanders by. Sometimes the SFRC doesn't have the clout to get its bills to the Senate Floor, so it gets ignored while all of its functions are packaged into the appropriations bills, without new authorization.

Obama's executive experience: running a campaign. [Link]

Governor Palin is, well, governor, and not currently the mayor of Wasila. As Governor, Palin operates a $9 billion budget, and manages $13 billion in revenue. Furthermore, she runs a government that employs 25,000 people.

Obama blithely pretends that she’s still the mayor of “Wasilly” in order to boost himself. However, running for office isn’t executive experience, for one good reason: Obama isn’t the campaign manager. He has a CEO actually running the campaign, handling the budget, and managing the people while Obama makes the speeches.

If this is Obama’s best response on the experience question, the attacks on Palin’s experience will have to stop, unless the campaign wants Obama to keep embarrassing himself while making it.