Noam Scheiber's profile of Sarah Palin's earliest political experiences has some great stories and insights. On some level, though, I think Scheiber buries his lede: Whether Palin truly picked her enemies through some sensitive antennae for condescension and elitism seems plausible, but not terribly provable. On the other hand, the fact that she was routinely underprepared for city council meetings and policy debates is provable, and Scheiber has a lot of suggestive quotes and moments that begin to sketch that picture. It's the sort of thing I hope other reporters pick up on, because it has some explanatory power for the odd situation we find ourselves in with Palin. Frank Rich got at a bit of this in his column over the weekend. "[Conservatives] know [Palin's] relentless ambition is the only hope for saving a ticket headed by a warrior who is out of juice and out of ideas. So what if she is preposterously unprepared to run the country in the midst of its greatest economic crisis in 70 years? She looks and sounds like a winner." There's nothing wrong with Palin's ambition. Saying successful politicians are ambitious is like saying professional basketball players are tall. Yeah...so? But the problem for Palin is, to mix the metaphors, that she's not practiced her shot. Young ambitious politicians tend to put in the intellectual work that anchors their ambitions. Barack Obama and Bill Clinton are both of this sort. Their fluency and command of national affairs was never in question. Others amass a record of service and achievement that lends their candidacies heft. Biden and McCain are of this school. But Palin is of neither. She has not put in the work to be able to speak even coherently on national affairs. She has not put in the years to have absorbed the information through osmosis. The problem for Palin isn't ambition, it's hubris. A more grounded politician would have put in the work to match their aspirations. That Palin hasn't done that bespeaks a tremendous, even scary, overconfidence. The severity of her temperamental unreadiness for the presidency -- at least at this juncture -- may in fact outweigh the dangers of her inexperience.
