Some quick facts

Population of Alaska: 670,053
Population of the city of San Jose, CA: 939,899
Size of Alaska National Guard: 1850 soldiers
Size of Alaska State Police: 240 troopers
Size of the San Jose Police Department: 1300-1400 officers
Alaska state budget: $11.2 billion
San Jose city budget: $3 billion
Alaska number of state employees: ~15,000
San Jose number of city employees: 6,843
Governor of Alaska: Sarah Palin
Mayor of San Jose: Chuck Reed

So what can we conclude from all this? Well, first of all, Mayor Chuck Reed is obviously much more of a fiscal conservative than Governor Sarah Palin, who presides over a bloated state budget that is almost four times as big as that of San Jose for just 70% as many people. Alaska also has more state employees per citizen than San Jose has, 45 citizens per employee for Alaska vs. 137 citzens per employee for San Jose, or 3 times as many employees per citizen. The Alaska State Police and Alaska National Guard combined are only barely larger than the heavily-armed San Jose police department, so it's hard to say that Sarah Palin has much more experience managing armed military units, especially given Mayor Reed's many years on the San Jose City Council and the fact that Governor Palin has no control of the ANG when it comes to national security issues -- the ANG is federalized for anything except local disaster recovery operations.

In other words, pretty much any mayor of a major U.S. city has better qualifications than Sarah Palin to be President of the United States. Pretty much every major U.S. mayor is more of a fiscal conservative than Sarah Palin's bloated Alaska state budget (bloated by all that oil money, the Alaska state government truly is a tax-and-spend liberal operation), pretty much every major U.S. mayor has more citizens that he serves than Sarah Palin, and so on and so forth. Let's face it, ten years as mayor of Moose Antler AK (population more or less) and another two years as mayor of Alaska does not a significant person make.

Republican attempts to make it seem like Palin has more experience than she really has are just silly. Now, there's a way to spin things, which is what Obama (who equally has twelve years of governing experience) does. "I'm not part of the ruling establishment," Obama says. "I'm an outsider. If you're tired of the same old stale politics, vote for me." Now, that's pretty much spin, Obama is a machine politician of the old skool, but the deal is, it's smart spin. Obama doesn't try to fake people out that he has more experience than he has. Now, if the Republicans had come up with a similar spin for Governor Palin -- "we've deliberately chosen an outsider who has not yet been corrupted by having significant government experience in order to shake up the stale Washington political game" -- that would have sucked the air out of a lot of Obama's spin. But they didn't. Instead they came up with nonsense like "being near Russia means you have foreign policy experience" (dude, a friend of mine lives *in* Russia, and he'll tell you that even being there doesn't give you foreign policy experience), and list Ireland as a place she's made a foreign policy visit even though it was just an airliner refueling stopover. It's as if they looked at everything Obama has done right, and decided to do it the other way. The Republican Party is the Egyptian Army of 1973, snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. And the embattled opposition is grateful for it.

-- Badtux the Politics Penguin