Tom Smith on Palin

This is very good:

The professed worries about Palin’s inexperience reveal so many layers of irony and hypocrisy one hardly knows where to begin. (Though granted, reasonable people may have such worries in good faith. I just think a lot of them aren’t.) To begin with the obvious, Obama has practically no relevant experience for being CEO of one of the largest and most dysfunctional organizations on earth, and he’s vying for the number 1 slot. He is running on the mind-numbingly repeated slogan of “Change” and yet his career has been one of almost preternatural conformity, first to Hyde Park progressivism, then to the leftish-liberalism of the urban wing of the Democratic party. His record of actually changing anything, a club, a law, an institution, or his mind, is as far as I can tell, perfectly void of content, a vacuum rarely found in nature. His agenda for change is apparently just to take the entrance ramp back onto the superhighway to serfdom, and make the Reagan-Bush-Clinton-Bush years just a prolonged rest stop. That slowing down wasn’t history ending, but just going into reverse.
 
Obama’s inexperience, his apparent unwillingness to risk his career for anything, and what seem to me the hallmarks of an utterly opportunistic character, are to me his best points. They suggest he wont be willing to stand up to determined opposition and may tack to the center to govern. You can call this “pragmatism” if you like. They seem to turn out pragmatists from Chicago at an alarming rate. But that sort of pragmatism is not how reform happens.
 
Palin is a very different story. Her career may be brief, but she has spent it running head on into some very powerful interests, the oily Alaskan GOP, and winning. She has doubtless had opportunities to be bought off, and hasn’t sold. I worked one summer for one of Anchorage’s established law firms that represented oil and gas interests, big Native corporations and the like. It may not be a big arena, but it is one where the play is rough. Saying Palin’s 20 months as governor in Alaska is not much experience in government is like saying 20 months as marshal in Dodge City is not much experience in law enforcement. It’s long enough for some things, like finding out if you are made of the right stuff or not. Obama also spent time as a public servant in a jurisdiction, Chicago, notorious for its corruption, but all I know he accomplished there was getting himself a really nice house at a great price, and moving on to a higher office. It’s that pragmatism again.

Read the whole thing. See also the link at the bottom of his post to a blog post from one of Palin’s Alaska neighbors.