What Senator Hagel does not realize

Another day, another shot at Governor Palin for her (presumably worrisome) lack of foreign policy experiennce-- this time from Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska.

Get a grip, Chuck. Elizabeth Crum had a rebuttal to your "argument" flagged last month.

To pull just one nugget out of a post you should read, Maggie Thatcher didn't have a lot of foreign policy experience when she became Prime Minister of England. She had brains, though, and she knew how to listen. Remind you of anyone?

Another thing we ought not forget is that Palin occupies the number two slot on the Republican ticket. Just because John McCain is old doesn't necessarily mean he'd die in office-- his mother is nearly a hundred and still going strong.

Does pulling foreign policy experience off the table help Obama as well as Palin? No, because Obama is at the top of the Democratic ticket. He's supposed to be able to handle more than being president of the Senate. By tapping Joe Biden for the number two slot, Obama acknowledged his own inexperience, while committing an unforced error (i.e., "Wrong Way Joe" Biden's foreign policy credentials consist largely of long service in the Senate, and a garrulous insistence on partitioning Iraq into three parts, as though it were the Gaul of Caesar's day).

Obama likes to point to work with Senator Richard Lugar (R-IN) on nuclear nonproliferation as evidence of "foreign policy" experience. That is certainly more to his credit than recent freelancing designed to slow the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq until such time as withdrawal makes him look good, but as Karl Rove explained last month, Obama's work on the Lugar-Obama bill wasn't all that. In Rove's summation: "the Lugar-Obama Bill was passed on a voice vote on December 11, 2006. It was so routine, there was no recorded vote. The media didn't consider it important or controversial. "