To say that 19 months executive experience of a lightly populated state is more experience than over 40 months as a Senator is not credible. A Senator deals with vast array of national issues with the President. Several good Presidents never served as governor, but instead came through the United States Senate. In contrast, Clinton and Carter, two disgraced Presidents, were governors. Your “executive experience” argument being the paramount and primary qualification would disqualify Kennedy, Nixon, and Lincoln, three brilliant men, and proclaim Clinton, preeminently qualified.
Very few people in history have spent 19 months running a US state.
It's a pretty big responsibility.
Even fewer have run a US state in a manner that garners 80+% approval from that state's population.
I understand that you feel that this is not as impressive as giving 12 hours of lectures per year to law school undergrads, but you'll have to make a much better argument for that case than "so what."
Her foreign policy experience is limited to eating at the International House of Pancakes.
Wow. You really can't come up with any of your own material.
In point of fact, she negotiated an enormous natural gas pipeline project with representatives of the Canadian government and has met with Japanese and Russian officials regarding international commerce.
Barack Obama has attended social functions with foreign officials and gave a speech in Berlin once.
Palin has more hands-on foreign policy experience than he does.
To say that 19 months executive experience of a lightly populated state is more experience than over 40 months as a Senator is not credible.
First of all, you can work as a Senator for 4000 months and it still isn't executive experience. It's legislative.
Second, the number of days of actual work as a Senator are quite light - especially when you're Barack Obama and don't actually do much legislating or even bother to call a meeting of your own committee in 40 months.
A Governor works all day, every day - including on vacation days that get cancelled and weekend days that become workdays.
Palin has done more actual government work in her 19 months than Obama in his 40 - much more, actually.
While Obama never bothered to so much as convoke the committee which he allegedly chairs, Palin called a special session of her state's legislature specifically to address important matters that the legislature was dragging its feet on.
A Senator deals with vast array of national issues with the President.
Really? Obama and Bush have been working closely together on national issues?
Please.
Several good Presidents never served as governor, but instead came through the United States Senate.
Here's the list of Presidents who never served as governor, and came to the Presidency through the Senate: Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan, Benjamin Harrison, Warren Harding, Harry Truman, John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon.
Seven of these nine were either forgettable or disgraced. Two have a good reputation today: Kennedy and Truman.
Those two share a quality with John McCain that Obama does not share - specifically a kind of executive experience. They were combat officers.
In contrast, Clinton and Carter, two disgraced Presidents, were governors
We went through the list of Senators. Let's look at the list of governors: Thomas Jefferson, James Monroe, Andrew Jackson, Martin Van Buren, John Tyler, James Polk, James Garfield, Rutherford Hayes, Grover Cleveland, William McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Calvin Coolidge, Franklin Roosevelt, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, George Bush.
You cherry pick two senators, inexplicably cherry pick one non-Senator, and then cherry pick two governors.
I'll put Jefferson, Monroe, Jackson, Polk, TR, Coolidge and Reagan up against the decidedly non-brilliant Kennedy and the colossal screwup Richard Nixon.
Lincoln was never a Senator, but if you want to claim right here and now that Obama is the equal of Abraham Lincoln, make an argument as to why.