Sarah Palin For President?

Dorothy Rabinowitz, a member of the Wall Street Journal editorial board, wrote an excellent piece in last Thursday's edition of the paper commenting on Sarah Palin's presidential aspirations.

Rabinowitz chose to focus on Palin's playing the victim role, and how that sets her apart from Reagan's legacy. A legacy she seems to believe she follows, and in which she believes she partakes.

I found other reasons to question Palin's fitness for the office, while discussing the topic with a friend recently.

With the visceral memory of presidents back to Johnson, several things bother me about Sarah Palin.

First is that she was governor of a relatively small state, in terms of population. The state has less than a million residents.

After voting for a man who was possibly our worst president ever, Jimmy Carter, and watching him become impotent within months of his inauguration, I don't trust small-state governors to be capable of handing our federal government. And certainly not one who failed to complete even one term.

Second, coming from a state so physically distant from areas of high US population, and having few people itself, I question whether Palin has an effective, sizable network of capable, credible advisers.

It's all well and good for her husband, the "First Dude" of Alaska, to be a primary confidant for the state's governor. But I really don't want to know that Sarah Palin would be largely reliant on her husband's advice to govern our nation.

Again, as with Carter, who also possessed an ineffective group of advisers, I am concerned that a group of professional hangers-on from the GOP would fill the void. Even the Journal editorial noted that she has hired some Washington policy guns to brief her and help her fill this important gap in her experience.

That's very troubling. You can well imagine the picture of an inexperienced, under-educated president relying on the advisers who happened to grab her attention first. Hardly like Reagan, who possessed good basic foreign and domestic instincts.

I believe Palin would provide an opportunity for has-been GOP graybeards, and worse, to try to manipulate her.

Many of Palin's core values are laudable and desirable in a president. But, at least at this time, Sarah Palin is simply too unfinished and politically immature to be a credible candidate for president of the US.