I wish I had more time to dig into this, but it's worth saying that Alaska is an extremely weird state. No state or income tax. Instead, they live off the extraction of various natural resources, namely through natural gas, oil, and mineral royalties. They are, in other words, a petrostate, but they happen to be part of America. And as with many of petrostates, they're corrupt, and good at it. No one save New Mexico gets a better deal from the federal government. For every dollar they pay in Federal Taxes, Alaska gets back $1.87 back in services. That's a 187 percent return on the investment. Not bad. And it's created a political culture that's basically about ensuring access to federal largess: That's why their senators are master appropriators, and their small town mayors employ lobbying firms to bring backs tens of millions in pork, and their governors exist in large part to ensure that someone drills in ANWR so Alaska can make some money from that patch of land. The state's basic structure requires a political class able to secure the continued federal investment to support it. As a reader e-mailed to me, "with that kind of money coming in plus the oil rebate slush fund I feel like Palin has less spent the last two years 'gaining executive experience' than playing Sim Governor on the easiest difficulty setting." That may undersell her experience a bit -- she has actually proven a skilled appropriator and lobbyist for Alaskan issues -- but not by that much: Being governor of California or Florida or Pennsylvania is, in many ways, similar to being president. Being governor of Alaska is not.