Hugh Hewitt: 'Would you rather have Barack Obama or Sarah Palin in charge of post-hurricane rescue and relief efforts? Who has had more experience with such situations?' :: Political News and commentaries

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August 31, 2008

Hugh Hewitt: 'Would you rather have Barack Obama or Sarah Palin in charge of post-hurricane rescue and relief efforts? Who has had more experience with such situations?'

Hugh Hewitt points out the enormous benefit of Sarah Palin's experiences in state and local government in his "Palin by Comparison," and what it provides her in the campaign and beyond as she takes up the duties of a vice president. Hugh points out that local government experience means an immersion in the real problems of real people as well as myriad of issues from the details of budgets for road maintenance and police and fire forces, land use issues, to parks and recreation and school construction issue issues.points, and being able to connect with people who look to the local government to get the big things in small towns right. Here's a few excerpts from Hugh's piece:

[...] Spend a decade doing this work and you will have made tens of thousands of decisions -and votes--and seen the consequences of public policy decisions play out in a large way even though the stage is relatively small. And you will have developed style and insight into people and bureaucracy. And you will be skilled in performing in public.

All of which is a way of alerting the MSM especially that just because they have never been to a small town city council meeting doesn't mean they don't matter, or that those who participate as leaders in such settings haven't picked up quite a lot along the way.

I fully expect to hear quite a few Sarah Palin speeches that include a paragraph that begins "When I was mayor of Wasilla"

The political and media elites have been laughing at Sarah Palin's "small town" years. But every mayor and council member she meets over the next two months will have a bond with her that no one else on the national tickets can match.

Most commentators have figured out or soon will with the help of Beldar that she really, really knows the energy issue, and to a nation stunned by the sudden shock to their household budgets brought about by 30 years of indifference to new exploration, this will be a huge advantage. But so will be her experience with federal Endangered Species Act, which has been and remains central to my law practice and which interests very few other than those impacted by it.

In many key states --Colorado, New Mexico, Florida, Washington and Oregon to name just five-- the "ESA" has had devastating impacts on many industries and communities. When Sarah Palin led her state into federal court to challenge the absurd listing of the polar bear as a "threatened species" because of predictions about what might happen to the bears if what might happen to polar ice actually did happen, she took a stand that will trigger sustained applause in places and among people who are actually familiar with the workings of this extraordinarily onerous statute. As an avid outdoorswoman and conservationist, she has zero fear of environmental activists jeering about her indifference to nature. Her passion for the great outdoors will reawaken the TR tradition in the GOP and combine it with an experience in federal bureaucratic meddling state and local governance that will put inside the Beltway a true property rights' advocate. I haven't seen reference yet to any specific experience witht Clean Water Act, NEPA or the Clean Air Act, but her familiarity with the federal hidden hand -the BLM, the USFWS, the ACOE--will be extremely useful as she campaigns across the country in communities hard hit by the expansion of federal regulation far beyond its intended and many believe constitutional limits.

The pro-life and pro-Second Amendment communities were immediately taken with Sarah Palin's record. But there are other constituencies out there which will love what they learn about the Alaska governor.

Read more ....

The MSM would be doing themselves a real favor by reading Hugh's entire piece; by doing so they will be doing themselves a favor, perhaps sparing them the embarrassment of further distancing themselves from their readers.

Posted by Mike in Iraq at August 31, 2008 6:44 PM

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