Five Things You Should Know About Sarah Palin

As the mainstream news media picks up the Obama-Biden mantra that Gov. Sarah Palin is lacking in experience to become vice president, here are five things you should know about her before making any conclusions about her:

• Palin has held elective office longer than Barack Obama. She was first elected to the city council in Wasilia, Alaska in 1992. After four years on the council, she was elected the city's mayor, a position she held for 10 years, including serving as President of the Alaska Conference of Mayors. In 2006, she was elected Alaska's first woman governor. She also chaired the Alaska Oil & Gas Conservation Commission for two years.
• As governor of Alaska, she serves as Commander in Chief of the Alaska National Guard. It's also worth noting that Alaska borders two international boundaries, including Canada and Russia. She has visited national guard troops deployed in Iraq and wounded soldiers in Germany. Admittedly, it's not much in the way of foreign or military experience, but it's more than Obama's zero experience. Note that he has chaired a subcommittee for the past two years dealing with Europe and the Middle East and has failed to hold a single meeting.
• She resigned in protest as Commissioner of the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission in order to expose legal violations and conflicts of interest of Alaska Republican leaders. Her whistle blowing efforts help bring down the governor, attorney general and state party chairman of her own party.
• She bucked the party establishment and took on and defeated an incumbent governor of her own party, promising to clean up Alaska politics.
• As governor, she has passed landmark ethics reform legislation and used her veto power to eliminate wasteful spending. In her first acts as governor, she fired the governor's chef and sold the state's jet on E-Bay. Remember that famous "Bridge To Nowhere" Sen. Stephens obtained $400 million in a federal earmark to build? She told the federal government to keep the money. She also campaigned against U.S. Rep. Don Young in the Republican primary because of his big-spending ways.

It is striking to note how comparisons of Palin's experience are being made to Obama's, the number one guy on the ticket and not the number two guy, Joe Biden. Is Sarah Palin's depth of experience as good as it could be? No. Is it deeper than Obama's experience? You bet it is. You can deride her experience all you want, but at the end of the day, she has executive experience which Obama, and for that matter, McCain and Biden, are lacking. Unfortunately, too many reporters immediately bought into the Obama spin on Palin and are misrepresenting her experience relative to Obama's and Biden's.

The Star's Matt Tully fell right into Obama's lap. "How does Sen. John McCain ever again question Sen. Barack Obama's experience, or argue that Obama isn't ready to lead?", he writes in his column today. "It's hard to imagine McCain could do either after choosing Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin to be his running mate, seeking to put a woman who until recently was mayor of a tiny city one breath away from the presidency." Before running down the Democratic talking points, Tully should have taken the time a good reporter would have done to learn who Sarah Palin is. If he had bothered to do that, he would know that the young 44-year-old governor brings experience none of the other three men on the ballot have to offer. And on the issue of change, there can be no question that Sarah Palin is the candidate who has demonstrated the strongest will through her actions to buck the status quo and fight for change.