Tactically Smart, Strategically Not? The Jury's Still Out

That's the way zeropundit frames the Palin choice. On the one hand, as I've been thinking, it's tactically the right choice in terms of the pure race itself. On the other hand - and I think everyone probably agrees here - she's not ready to take the office of President on Day One. She has no foreign policy experience or defense experience, for instance.

But, neither does Obama, and I found myself recently for the first really realizing that. If we say Palin isn't qualified to lead, then we need to better understand why that same logic doesn't apply to Obama, who has no executive experience. Fabius Maximus does a side-by-side, impartial comparison of Obama and Palin. Here's Palin's short political resume:

Part-time Wasilla City Council: 1992 - 1996
Part-time Wasilla Mayor: 1996 - 2002 (2000 population 5,470)
Part-time Member, Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission: 19 February 2003 to 23 January 2004
Alaska Governor: 4 December 2006 to present (21 months).

Here's Obama's equally short list.

IL Senate: 1 January 1997 - 4 November 2004
US Senate: 4 January 2005 - present (44 months)

He notes that half of Obama's time was spent campaigning (approximately). Most of what Obama has over her is his education and his intelligence. His academic pedigree is superb, and he taught at Chicago for 12 years, making me suspect his grasp of policy could be good. But he himself has no experience working with a diversity of interest groups, or the myriad of other things that is required of management. For the government, too, we know that intelligence and education are poor predictors of competency in public administration (See Posner and Becker's old posts for this). So do we necessarily weight his education positively, negatively or neutrally?

Point is, a lot of people's confidence in Obama has to do with his charisma, not his experience in executive office. Palin's had some, but nowhere near enough if we believe there are returns to experience. But, then, that takes us back to Obama, who is also a spring chicken. It's interesting what McCain's choice is doing. It's inevitable that the selection highlights Obama's inexperience. That is of course going to be a hard case to make by McCain's team, because who wants to at this point talk about that, but how can McCain not take it up defensively if Obama brings it up? Maybe it's for that reason Obama's now distancing himself from his earlier remarks made about Palin as inexperienced, saying that it wasn't him who said it, but his staff, and they don't represent him. Maybe no one wants to talk about experience anymore. Because, if you take experience out of this altogether, as one person said it the other day (I think in a comment on MR), Obama beats Palin and McCain hands down.