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Gerard Baker the American editor of the London Times has a piece that compares Sarah Palin, not to Biden, but to Barack Obama.

Democrats, between sniggers of derision and snorts of disgust, contend that Sarah Palin, John McCain’s vice-presidential pick is ridiculously unqualified to be president.

It’s a reasonable objection on its face except for this small objection: it surely needs to be weighed against the Democrats’ claim that their own candidate for president is self-evidently ready to assume the role of most powerful person on the planet.

At first blush, here’s what we know about the relative experience of the two candidates. Both are in their mid-forties and have held statewide elective office for less than four years. Both have admitted to taking illegal drugs in their youth.

So much for the similarities. How about the differences?

Political experience

Obama: Worked his way to the top by cultivating, pandering to and stroking the most powerful interest groups in the all-pervasive Chicago political machine, ensuring his views were aligned with the power brokers there.

Palin: Worked her way to the top by challenging, attacking and actively undermining the Republican party establishment in her native Alaska. She ran against incumbent Republicans as a candidate willing and able to clean the Augean Stables of her state’s government. …

… Now it’s true there are other crucial differences. Sen Obama has appeared on Meet The Press every other week for the last four years. He has been the subject of hundreds of adoring articles in papers and newsweeklies and TV shows and has written two Emmy-award winning books.

Gov Palin has never appeared on Meet the Press, never been on the cover of Newsweek. She presumably feels that, as a mother of five children married to a snowmobile champion, who also happens to be the first woman and the youngest person ever to be elected governor of her state, she has not really done enough yet to merit an autobiography.

Then again, I’m willing to bet that if she had authored The Grapes of Wrath, sung like Edith Piaf and composed La Traviata , she still wouldn’t have won an Emmy.

Fortunately, it will be up to the American people and not their self-appointed leaders in Hollywood and New York to determine who really has the better experience to be president.

John Fund shorts on Obama’s lack of bounce (maybe he can’t jump either). And, on the MSM treatment of Palin and her family.

… Democrats, who were so anxious to avoid discussing the John Edwards affair even after clear evidence surfaced of his adultery and alleged illicit parenthood, can’t stop talking about Ms. Palin’s family troubles. “The name on the tongues of gleeful Dems, meanwhile: Eagleton,” notes Politico.com. That’s a reference to the 1972 Democratic vice presidential nominee Tom Eagleton, who had to withdraw from the ticket after reports he had been hospitalized for depression.

Somehow I think Democrats and their media allies will be laughing a little less after Wednesday night when Sarah Palin gets her own chance to speak to the American people without a media filter. They may find that all the ridicule will strike many Americans as excessive if the Alaska governor delivers a solid good performance.

Ed Morrissey posts; Obama’s answer on experience: But I’m such a great campaigner!

… the main point here is that Obama didn’t really answer the question, and he set up a straw man argument in response to Cooper. 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.

Jonathan Adler in Corner post on the “experience of Howard Dean and John Edwards.

Jay Cost tries to look at the Palin pick through non-partisan eyes.

… So, the public gets a pretty sophisticated choice this year. It’s not a choice between change versus more of the same. It’s a choice between degrees of change. I like this. And while I have no idea how Palin will play, I like that McCain believes he has to offer something positive and new to win.

I still think Obama would have been best served by selecting Hillary Clinton as his nominee. However, given the choice not to select Hillary, I think he made a wise move by picking Joe Biden. As I noted above, Biden is a guy who tells it like it is. So, he adds heft without damaging Obama’s core message. The Democrats have a well-balanced ticket. John McCain responded by balancing his ticket well, too.

All things considered, I like these tickets. Together, they give the public a clear choice. Plus, neither offers the public what it certainly does not want, the status quo. People complain all the time about how our two-party system stifles real debate and fails to offer the public a distinct choice. I am optimistic that, when all is said and done, Obama v. McCain will be one that the naysayers won’t point to. When they whine about our “failed politics,” they’ll have to conveniently forget 2008.

Debra Saunders on Palin.

… For weeks, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin has been the Republican whom conservatives barely dared to hope could become John McCain’s pick as his running mate.

For Republicans angry at Washington’s big-spending bonanza when Republicans controlled the White House and Congress, Palin, like McCain, is an antidote. She is the Alaskan who pulled state support for the infamous Bridge to Nowhere and bucked Alaska’s congressional and state Republican leaders.

For social conservatives, the mother of five has impeccable credentials. She’s a member of Feminists for Life who walked the walk in April when she gave birth to a son, shown by genetic testing to have Down syndrome. “I’m looking at him right now, and I see perfection,” she said of her son, Trig. “Yeah, he has an extra chromosome. I keep thinking, in our world, what is normal and what is perfect?”

For conservatives who felt that McCain at times has been too cozy with the Washington left, Palin is a conservative’s conservative – a moose hunter and co-owner of a commercial fishing operation. …

Two NY Times columnists on the Palin pick. Bill Kristol is first.

… I spent an afternoon with Palin a little over a year ago in Juneau, and have followed her career pretty closely ever since. I think she can pull it off. I’m not the only one. The day after the V.P. announcement, I spoke with an old friend, James Muller, chairman of the political science department at the University of Alaska, Anchorage. He said that Palin “has been underestimated over and over again. She took on the party and state establishments here in Alaska, and left them reeling. She’s a very good campaigner, a quick study and a fighter.”

Muller called particular attention to her successes in passing an increase to the oil production tax and facilitating the future construction of a huge natural gas pipeline. “At first the oil companies thought she was naïve, and they’d have their way. Instead she faced them down and forced them to compromise on her terms.”

Can she face down the Democrats, Joe Biden and the national media over the next couple of months?

John McCain is betting she can. Perhaps, as he pondered his vice-presidential selection, he recalled the advice of Margaret Thatcher: “In politics if you want anything said, ask a man. If you want anything done, ask a woman.”

David Brooks.

… When McCain met Sarah Palin last February, he was meeting the rarest of creatures, an American politician who sees the world as he does. Like McCain, Palin does not seem to have an explicit governing philosophy. Her background is socially conservative, but she has not pushed that as governor of Alaska. She seems to find it easier to work with liberal Democrats than the mandarins in her own party.

Instead, she seems to get up in the morning to root out corruption. McCain was meeting a woman who risked her career taking on the corrupt Republican establishment in her own state, who twice defeated the oil companies, who made mortal enemies of the two people McCain has always held up as the carriers of the pork-barrel disease: Young and Stevens.

Many people are conditioned by their life experiences to see this choice of a running mate through the prism of identity politics, but that’s the wrong frame. Sarah Barracuda was picked because she lit up every pattern in McCain’s brain, because she seems so much like himself.

The Palin pick allows McCain to run the way he wants to — not as the old goat running against the fresh upstart, but as the crusader for virtue against the forces of selfishness. It allows him to make cleaning out the Augean stables of Washington the major issue of his campaign.

So my worries about Palin are not (primarily) about her lack of experience. She seems like a marvelous person. She is a dazzling political performer. And she has experienced more of typical American life than either McCain or his opponent. On Monday, an ugly feeding frenzy surrounded her daughter’s pregnancy. But most Americans will understand that this is what happens in real life, that parents and congregations nurture young parents through this sort of thing every day.

My worry about Palin is that she shares McCain’s primary weakness — that she has a tendency to substitute a moral philosophy for a political philosophy. …

We get a look inside the thinking of the McCain campaign on Sarah.

In Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, Sen. John McCain has found a fellow maverick to be his running mate — one who can help bring the right kind of reform to Washington. Ms. Palin, like Mr. McCain, has a strong record of battling the status quo, restoring accountability and effectiveness to government, and working to secure energy independence, root out corruption and curb wasteful spending.

As the chief executive of the nation’s largest state, Ms. Palin oversees some of the country’s largest energy reserves. She came into office at a critical time in Alaska politics, facing a system plagued by corruption. Her response was to immediately begin cleaning it up. The results of her leadership today speak for themselves: Ms. Palin’s approval ratings top 80% — more than 60% higher than that of the Democratic Congress. …

Dilbert’s here.

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Spengler from Asia Times again. This time on Americans who play Monopoly, and Russians who play chess.

On the night of November 22, 2004, then-Russian president – now premier – Vladimir Putin watched the television news in his dacha near Moscow. People who were with Putin that night report his anger and disbelief at the unfolding “Orange” revolution in Ukraine. “They lied to me,” Putin said bitterly of the United States. “I’ll never trust them again.” The Russians still can’t fathom why the West threw over a potential strategic alliance for Ukraine. They underestimate the stupidity of the West.

American hardliners are the first to say that they feel stupid next to Putin. Victor Davis Hanson wrote on August 12 [1] of Moscow’s “sheer diabolic brilliance” in Georgia, while Colonel Ralph Peters, a columnist and television commentator, marveled on August 14 [2], “The Russians are alcohol-sodden barbarians, but now and then they vomit up a genius … the empire of the czars hasn’t produced such a frightening genius since [Joseph] Stalin.” …

… The fact is that all Russian politicians are clever. The stupid ones are all dead. By contrast, America in its complacency promotes dullards. A deadly miscommunication arises from this asymmetry. The Russians cannot believe that the Americans are as stupid as they look, and conclude that Washington wants to destroy them. That is what the informed Russian public believes, judging from last week’s postings on web forums, including this writer’s own.

These perceptions are dangerous because they do not stem from propaganda, but from a difference in existential vantage point. Russia is fighting for its survival, against a catastrophic decline in population and the likelihood of a Muslim majority by mid-century. The Russian Federation’s scarcest resource is people. It cannot ignore the 22 million Russians stranded outside its borders after the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, nor, for that matter, small but loyal ethnicities such as the Ossetians. Strategic encirclement, in Russian eyes, prefigures the ethnic disintegration of Russia, which was a political and cultural entity, not an ethnic state, from its first origins.

The Russians know (as every newspaper reader does) that Georgia’s President Mikheil Saakashvili is not a model democrat, but a nasty piece of work who deployed riot police against protesters and shut down opposition media when it suited him – in short, a politician in Putin’s mold. America’s interest in Georgia, the Russians believe, has nothing more to do with promoting democracy than its support for the gangsters to whom it handed the Serbian province of Kosovo in February.

Again, the Russians misjudge American stupidity. Former president Ronald Reagan used to say that if there was a pile of manure, it must mean there was a pony around somewhere. His epigones (second-rate imitators) have trouble distinguishing the pony from the manure pile. The ideological reflex for promoting democracy dominates the George W Bush administration to the point that some of its senior people hold their noses and pretend that Kosovo, Ukraine and Georgia are the genuine article.

Think of it this way: Russia is playing chess, while the Americans are playing Monopoly. What Americans understand by “war games” is exactly what occurs on the board of the Parker Brothers’ pastime. The board game Monopoly is won by placing as many hotels as possible on squares of the playing board. Substitute military bases, and you have the sum of American strategic thinking.

America’s idea of winning a strategic game is to accumulate the most chips on the board: bases in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, a pipeline in Georgia, a “moderate Muslim” government with a big North Atlantic Treaty Organization base in Kosovo, missile installations in Poland and the Czech Republic, and so forth. But this is not a strategy; it is only a game score.

Chess players think in terms of interaction of pieces: everything on the periphery combines to control the center of the board and prepare an eventual attack against the opponent’s king. The Russians simply cannot absorb the fact that America has no strategic intentions: it simply adds up the value of the individual pieces on the board. It is as stupid as that. But there is another difference: the Americans are playing chess for career and perceived advantage. Russia is playing for its life …

John Fund says Obama should come clean and provide records that will help us understand his past.

… The Obama campaign didn’t hesitate to criticize Hillary Clinton for not revealing the names of donors to the Clinton Library, or John McCain for releasing only two years of tax returns as opposed to Mr. Obama’s 10 years. Those were proper questions. But so too are requests for information from Mr. Obama, a man whose sudden rise and incompletely reported past makes him among the least-vetted of presidential nominees.

Reporters who decline to press Mr. Obama for more information now, whether it be on William Ayers or the Rezko-Auchi partnership, may be repeating an old mistake. Most reporters failed to dig deep enough into the Nixon White House’s handling of Watergate before the 1972 election. The country was soon consumed with that scandal. Most reporters pooh-poohed questionable Whitewater real-estate dealings of the Clintons before Bill Clinton’s 1992 election. Within months of his inauguration a tangled controversy led to the appointment of a special prosecutor and an endless source of distraction for the Clinton White House. …

Speaking of coming clean, Inside Higher Ed has a piece by a Clemson English prof on Biden’s plagiarisms and the problems for some of his fans.

… But I wish Obama could have located someone with foreign policy experience who did not have Biden’s track record of intellectual dishonesty, because I’d hoped to be motivated to do more this fall than show up and pull a lever for Obama. After this VP choice, however, I feel that’s the most Obama can expect from a constituency he has indicated he takes for granted.

Biden’s dishonesty matters to me in two ways. It suggests something of Biden’s character, indeed, in a realm more relevant to doing his job than was John Edwards’s philandering to his. The other reason is selfish. Now that Barack Obama has deemed a plagiarist worthy of the vice-presidency, it becomes more difficult for me to make the case in the classroom that plagiarism matters. More broadly speaking, Obama’s choice has made it harder for me, and for my colleagues across the United States, to defend the principles that form the foundation of scholarship.

David Broder, dean of the main stream media thinks Palin might help.

… Obama began his campaign for the nomination as the outsider candidate, promising fundamental change in Washington and offering a post-partisan approach to politics. With time, he has come to be seen as a much more conventional Democrat who is now half of a ticket based in Congress, the least admired institution in a widely scorned capital. Millions who saw his acceptance speech heard a standard recital of liberal Democratic programs.

By picking Palin, McCain has strengthened his reputation not as an ideologue, not as a partisan, but as a reformer — ready to shake up Washington as his hero, Teddy Roosevelt, once did. My guess is that cleansing Washington of its poisonous partisanship, its wasteful spending and its incompetence will become McCain’s major theme.

The Democrats‘ great advantage is that they are not responsible for the pain and frustration that many voters have suffered in the Bush years. But if McCain and Palin can shift the focus to the future, they may be able to appeal to the “change” voters who will in the end decide the election.

Broder’s mildly favorable look at McCain’s VP pick is of a piece with his previous column on Obama’s convention speech which Broder found disappointing. It’s here for you to read.

… He is not the first Democrat who has promised a new day. Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, in different ways, tried to change Washington, and both wound up frustrated. The status quo forces — the interest groups, many in Congress and parts of the media — all are powerful.

The only time a new president can really change Washington is when he makes it the central message of his campaign, as Ronald Reagan did in 1980.

Reagan’s skill was his rhetoric; hence the label “The Great Communicator.” After the 2004 Obama speech, Democrats thought they had found one of their own. It’s too bad that fellow didn’t make it to Denver.

David Brooks mocks the Denver Dem effort.

My fellow Americans, it is an honor to address the Democratic National Convention at this defining moment in history. We stand at a crossroads at a pivot point, near a fork in the road on the edge of a precipice in the midst of the most consequential election since last year’s “American Idol.”

One path before us leads to the past, and the extinction of the human race. The other path leads to the future, when we will all be dead. We must choose wisely.

We must close the book on the bleeding wounds of the old politics of division and sail our ship up a mountain of hope and plant our flag on the sunrise of a thousand tomorrows with an American promise that will never die! For this election isn’t about the past or the present, or even the pluperfect conditional. It’s about the future, and Barack Obama loves the future because that’s where all his accomplishments are. …