I don't get the experience argument with Palin. Is she qualified to be President imo? No, she isn't but she isn't running for President. Frankly, most people don't care how much experience the VP has and the thought of a President dying in office so rarely happens that people really don't put too much thought into it.

The problem with Kaine I think is that the Obama team decided that it was too risky to put 2 inexperienced candidates on a ticket.

Anyway, is this a hail mary pass? I think it could be. I thought Biden was one too.

Palin is getting insulted because she has more executive experience than Obama.  His vast legislative experience was working for people like Palin!  Any one willing to take a guess how long it will take him to realize that if her inexperience matters for being the VP, HIS inexperience is going to matter MORE because he wants to be the President.

The fact that women are "insulted", i.e., read faux outrage, because he chose a woman in an attempt to get more women to vote for him is disingenious as h*ll!  Obama chose Biden to get people to trust him and overlook the inexperience issue, he was looking at Byah, in part, for Ohio... etc.  This is what a running mate is for... to help you win.  

I disagree with Palin's stance on abortion, but she lives by her principles, and that doesn't mean we need to insult her.  And by insulting her, we are going to turn voters off.

The thing that is also unsettling about Palin to most men I guess is that she is also quite good looking.

Kaine obviously would've been seen as a complement to Obama.  What bothers me is that there are some people on blogs who now say, who cares about Kaine's qualifications, he wasn't selected anyway.  Well, if you thought it was okay that he might've been selected, then why do you care that McCain actually did select someone with similar qualifications?  Would you have hated Obama if he chose Kaine?

Lord knows Bush considered ready to be C-in-C.  

Anderson Cooper just said, "Can Republicans really argue this is a choice about governance, or was this purely a choice about politics and getting elected?"  

So, Palin experience doesn't matter. She is a conservative and I totally disagree with her.

The Democrats jump on her selection is an error in judgment. She already buried the Democratic convention and showed again that Obama's selection of Biden was cowardly. She may also appeal to centrist women that would have voted for Hillary but now may gravitate towards McCain. We know little about Palin, but if she turns out to be dynamic and smart, it spells more trouble for Obama.

The point is not some hypothetical that should be taken as equivalent between the two candidates. The fact is that McCain DID pick an unqualified person while Obama didn't. Instead he picked one of the most qualified people possible.

Why the experience questions for Palin? Are you kidding? It's not because she's a woman (some maybe pushing it for this reason and they should be called on it), but her very national obscurity brings up the question, (who is this person and what have they done) and McCain's reasons (?) and even her own resume pushing just point out the skimpiness of it. Again, McCain has been pushing experience, and his choice was bound to get examined by that measure.

But the teeth-bared ferocity and the ridicule would not under any circumstances have been applied to a Kaine, a Jindal, a Pawlenty or indeed, I'm now convinced, any other man who wasn't an out-and-out goofball like a Quayle.

But I think on the whole you're wrong about this.
One, you're comparing her to people who weren't picked. Yes, I know, you're saying, "those people were considered," but so was Chet Edwards and so were a bunch of other people who no one has ever heard of or who made no sense. So were Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina. These people weren't scrutinized as much because they weren't picked. If they had been, it absolutely would've been an issue.

All we can judge is who was actually chosen. And what we see is a campaign that spent a solid month and a half using the phrase "dangerously unready to be President" and then selected arguably the least experienced VP in modern history to understudy to the oldest presidential candidate ever.

Two, she really really really has amazingly little experience. Yes, this is Obama's problem too, and I frankly don't expect (or think he should) attack her on it much because it's better to just let McCain's hypocrisy eat him up than go on offense over it. But Obama, let's be clear, will reach the Presidency with 4 years of Senate experience and 8 years in the state legislature. That's pretty damn weak, I'll agree, but to say it's comparable to 20 months as governor after being mayor of a preposterously small town ... No, Obama is not a paragon of experience, but Palin makes him look like Henry Freaking Kissinger. Obama has had a national position on every major foreign policy and national issue, Palin has said almost nothing about every major issue in this race, and when she has said something, it's been light and contradictory to John McCain.

What's more, she already lied about opposing the bridge to nowhere in her opening speech.

(I guess he [McCain] assumes that women will just blindly vote for anyone with a vagina)

The reduction of "women" as "anyone with a vagina" is entirely the construct of the new left authoritarian writer quoted here. There are social, cultural, political, psychological, and many other kinds of identity structures that play a role in determining how each woman determines the meaning of womanhood in her own life. This total erasure of gendered identity with a reference to biological genitalia exists in the mind of this writer alone (well, and his formerly A-list blogger com-[p]Atriots).

The faux progressives do not seem to grasp that women have vastly complex political identities - just as men do! To be a woman, one does not have to tow the Democratic party line.

(I suppose, all progressive men just might be dupes of Democratic women as well, but does the vanguard of the party - its "creative class" -  really want to go there with this line of argument? Increasingly, it seems to me, the genius of Republican strategists in the past 20 years has not lied in the exploitation of conservatives' prejudices, the whole dog whistle theory.

No mention was made of Kaine being a potential VP pick or how little experience he had at all.

I think Obama's experience should be an issue in the election, it's one of the only fair criticisms McCain has in my opinion. But McCain just picked someone preposterous.

Obama's record is weak, but let's look at it: 3 years as a senator, 8 years as a state legislator.

Here's Palins' record: 20 months as a governor, 4 years city council experience and 6 years mayoral experience in a town of 8000.

Now I suppose if you squint real hard you can pretend this is equivalent, but it's simply not. Her experience has almost no relation to national politics and up to this month she has had no position on the Iraq war and a host of other national issues defining this race. Obama may have just exploded onto this scene ten minutes ago, but he at least did it by talking about and addressing national issues.

You know how I know this?  Because Obama supporters mentioned his lack of experience a million times during the primary to make the case for O.  And Al Gore talked about it last night.

I don't like anything about Palin's positions (except when she kicks around Republicans), but this whole day is making me very sympathetic towards her.  That annoys me.

So now McCain has chosen an even less experienced governor, one who doesn't have anything like the buzz Jindal had.  Of course the question comes up.  And let's make no mistake here: if 'she' were a 'he', Palin wouldn't be the nominee.  Does anyone seriously think that's not the case?

The Palin pick is ALL about that and I wonder how long it is going take for the Obama campaign to realize this.  The fact that she happens to be a female is an incidental plus, but not central to his choice.

McCain has seen an opening in part allowed by the Biden pick, among other things that you can probably figure out.

The argument about experience from the point of view of the McCain campaign is no longer that important to them, although  They will be happy to let the discussion continue to be about that for the next few days.  Every day it happens only re-affirms that Palin is an outsider and so is McCain for making the pick.

The play at the convention I believe McCain will be making is to chastise his party in some fashion and cast himself and Palin as reformers. ("We've lost our way and I will lead you back.").  The game to them is grab the change mantle from Obama before Obama realizes it is happening.  Every discussion about Palin's experience will offer continued chances to highlight her mavericky-ness, which is the more important case.  This is all about turning the tables and making Obama/Biden look like the Washington insiders playing the same old politics.  It's an attack to the strength... sound familiar?

Don't get me wrong, I'm sure McCain is happy that Palin is female and he possibly gets to participate in some history, but that was not the qualifier.  It's her story as an outsider, as a reformer of her own party and outside of her party.  This is the ground he is after.  Every day the Obama campaign and the media discuss her experience allows for talking points about how the nature of her experience is so much different.

I really think McCain is willing to abandon the experience argument if it allows him to turn the chess board over and battle for the change mantle.

For this Palin is the perfect pick, gender notwithstanding.

Today, McCain assured that his base would come home.  

I feel like I'm being pretty fair here. I'm not claiming Obama is experienced and I'm not claiming the campaign should be about experience. I wish he'd waited before running for President. I'm simply stating that Governor Palin has less experience than Barack Obama, and John McCain just spent two months telling us that was unacceptable.

Before this selection, Barack Obama was probably the least experienced person to run for modern office since Jimmy Carter. Now, after this selection, Palin sets a new low on almost every level.

The refrain in many of the Democratic leaders' responses to Sen. John McCain's choice of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate: Roe v. Wade, Roe v. Wade.

The 1973 Supreme Court decision nationalizing a woman's right to get an abortion was a top-of-mind issue for top Democrats.

Voters, beware, the Democrats' message seemed to be: Palin is not in favor of abortion rights.

The Democrats seemed to be concerned that some voters might be under the misapprehension that Palin was a pro-choice woman -- or that because she is a woman, it might help McCain get the votes of pro-choice women.

Now, doesn't it make a lot more sense to talk about something like this, rather than the stupid "experience" debate?  The GOP is loving every minute of the experience argument.  They are using it to talk about all of Palin's accomplishments in office and to continue calling Obama's experience into question.  God, talk about something real for once.

Palin and McCain have 60 days to convince us that a woman who recently said she's given no thought at all about Iraq is ready to go.  We'll see how it goes, but somehow I don't think it's suddenly going to come out that she has thought long and hard about all the major problems of the day and has things to say about them that make voters like me think she's up to the job.

Tomorrow is another day to argue and second guess politicians and fellow posters.

The new thing that has happened is that while Obama picked a VP who everyone sees as ready to be president if necessary, McCain has chosen someone nobody has heard of, and who has nothing obvious to recommend her.  Now, it could well be the case that over the next 60 days we will learn that Palin has been this hidden gem of amazing leadership and wisdom hiding away in Alaska.  If so, McCain's judgment is confirmed and that'll probably move voters to him.  But as of tonight that's not hardly an obvious outcome.  She looks like someone who has just stepped into statewide office, who (by her own admission) hasn't given much thought to Iraq, and who otherwise looks unprepared to take office.

McCain's judgment isn't looking so good.  How many voters are going to feel comfortable with the idea that if McCain has a heart attack on February 1st, 2009, Sarah Palin is going to be the one who has to play hardball with Putin and decide how to handle Teheran?  It's a hard sell.  McCain's judgment on all of this looks bad.  And I fearlessly forecast that as this sinks in, McCain's numbers are going to drop like a rock.

I say, good, that's the only way they were going to win anyway.

But running on the issues means that Obama will lose some of his media darling status.  We already saw that in some pundit class's reactions to his speech on Thursday.

One thing it's shown us all as we heard many people say, it's not that I'm against a woman, it's that I don't like that woman. Well now we know it's really pretty much any woman.

And, politically, it's really stupid imo. It will cause many people to want do defined Palin. It will wake some people up to the sexism that's been coming out of the Democratic party. It's really sad that given the anti-woman (imo) platform that the republicans have (pro-life), democrates are actually worse towards women.

I don't think they'd be ramming on it like they are now, though.

As others have said, the only way the Democrats can win is if they stick to the issues.  And not the truthy cr*p I've seen spun about today -- the Republicans are not Clinton and they will hit back hard, in a way Clinton was constrained from doing.  But the actual issues with evidence to back it up, and just those issues where they have the advantage in both actuality and perception.

Alaska is a small state. Population-wise, it is equivalent to Memphis, TN (wikipedia). Budget-wise, it is equivalent to San Francisco (wikipedia). Virginia and Florida are 12th and 4th biggest states , population-wise.

If McCain had picked the mayor of San Francisco or mayor of Memphis, the experience argument would be a lot more relevant. Why, then, does the simple title "Governor" change anything?