You knew it was coming.
“Today, John McCain put the former mayor of a town of 9,000 with zero foreign policy experience a heartbeat away from the presidency.
-Obama campaign spokesman Bill Burton
and
Unlike Barack Obama, whom McCain has so emphatically condemned as not-ready, Palin hasn’t run for or served in the Senate. Nor has she run for president, which would have required her to think through and take positions on critical issues from the war in Iraq to the war on terror, from Iran’s nuclear ambitions to the Russian incursion into Georgia, from the emerging power of China to the march of globalization. She hasn’t debated tough opponents a dozen or so times or faced aggressive, often downright hostile reporters on a daily basis. Talk about untested. Her slim record undermines one of McCain’s most effective arguments against Obama.
-Fmr. Clinton WH Press Secretary Dee Dee Myers
Left-leaning observers have noted that with John McCain's choice of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as his running mate, all arguments about Barack Obama's experience are off the table. It is true that Senator McCain's age (72 today) heightens the importance of who he chooses as his vice president. He has acknowledged this point, and while it may be an unfair criticism, it is one that will linger in the minds of many voters.
Last week, Obama's choice of Joe Biden as his running mate led many to believe that this was a governing decision rather than a political one; that voters could take comfort in knowing that the freshman senator from Illinois would have an experienced statesman in the White House guiding his hand on international affairs.
Sarah Palin has run a city and a state, whereas both Democrats on the ticket have run only their Senate offices (unless you also count Obama's presidency of the Harvard Law Review). However, let's assume that Obama and Palin have equally negligible experience, specifically on foreign policy and homeland security. A vote for McCain may mean that Sarah Palin never takes office, but a vote for the similarly fresh Obama puts him directly in the role of commander in chief.
In the event that Palin does need replace John McCain in the role of commander-in-chief, who is to say that she cannot make the same decision as Obama did on the campaign trail and tap a senator or diplomat with years of foreign policy experience as her vice president? If we are to believe that Joe Biden covers Barack Obama's dearth of foreign relations experience, it stands to reason that a newly minted President Palin could pick the likes of Dick Lugar, Condoleezza Rice, or John Bolton to serve alongside her.
Furthermore, the Republicans cannot afford to undersell the executive experience Sarah Palin brings as one of America's fifty state governors. As Mike Huckabee put it in the January 30th primary debate in Simi Valley, California:
There's something a lot of people don't think about. When you're a governor, you actually manage a microcosm of the federal government. Every agency that you have at the federal level, you have at the state level. You are familiar with the whole game board. You understand what those agencies do, because you interrelate with them as a governor every single day.
-Fmr. Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee
This is something that Sarah Palin has undoubtedly learned very well, even in her short tenure in Juneau. It is a point she can raise in the upcoming debate against Joe Biden, who has never held state, local, or executive office. And when she does, her base of knowledge might surprise a lot of the people who have made cynical observations about what they perceive as an experience gap.
