The Pitbull With Lipstick

Sarah Palin has done for women what liberal feminism has failed to do for the last 40 years. Sarah Palin is what women like Hillary Clinton only hope to be.

Palin worked her way up through the ranks, serving on the PTA, city council, as a mayor, and then as a governor. Most people would call that "multi-level experience." It's what the late, great Peggy Carter called "trenchwork."

And unlike Hillary Clinton, she did it all without the benefit of riding on her husband's name.

Palin saw the flaws in her local and state government, and started at the beginning - her local PTA. Sarah Palin understood that political effectiveness isn't measured by how many people know your name, but by how many people benefit by your efforts and think that it just happened that way.

Rather than wait for someone else to fix Alaska's Republican party, or whine about the corrupt elected officials in her state to her neighbors, Palin took on the system and went to battle for her fellow Alaskans. And it worked – she's the only governor in the United States with an 80% approval rating.

And now she is running for the chance to go to battle for us, her fellow Americans. We should be so lucky as to have her serve us as Vice President of the United States.

The condescension coming from both the MSM and the uninformed men-on-the-street here in our state shows a complete lack of understanding of what grassroots conservatism is.

In one sense, we have no one to blame but ourselves for this predicament. We have allowed the voters in Oklahoma and America to remain apathetic and rely on the MSM to think for them. We talk amongst ourselves about ballot initiatives and legislative actions without bringing the information to the people en masse. We only are at their doors and in their mailboxes during major election cycles. We are now seeing the result of this.

People by and large seem to think that a qualified politician is someone who wakes up one day and says, "Hmm, to bring to fruition my life's aspiration of being the youngest governor elected in my state, I'm going to run for State Representative and start to make a name for myself." Or else, they were recruited by the evil political machine that is oozing its way through our state government, and therefore they are assumed to be qualified because they have recognizable names and large PAC donations backing them.

Sarah Palin does not fit this profile, and so people feel comfortable calling her "inexperienced."

Palin didn't wait for someone else to fight the corrupt, embedded Republicans in her state. And she didn't wait for a high-profile opportunity to come available. She didn't join the corrupt Republican power brokers in her state to make her political road easier.

She didn't care about the notoriety. She didn't care about the difficulty. She knew she would be fighting against her own Lance Cargills and Chris Benges and Jeff MacMahans and Gene Stipes and Brad Henrys and Aubrey McClendons and Clay Bennets, and that they would fight dirty.

And she did it anyway.

That is grassroots politics, and grassroots Conservatism. Sarah Palin has real experience, not drummed-up politicized "experience" based on who her political connections are.

She put in the time on lower levels because she cared more about making a difference than about making a name for herself. She moved up the political food chain as duty called her, not as ego drove her. Sarah Palin was willing to do the work that elitist Republicans wouldn't do.

Sarah Palin came from a "small town" to become Governor of one of the largest states in our union because she is effective. She is accomplished.

She has experience.

To say otherwise is to be willfully ignorant of the facts. I pity the fool.