@A Lone Voice,
It's not just the experience factor.
Palin has no intellectual depth. Her thinking is shallow, muddled, confused, and overly concrete. This is not something that can be necessarily overcome with more experience or "growing in office". She seems to be lacking in basic intellectual ability. I think I can understand why she had to bounce through 5 different colleges in order to obtain her degree.
If anything, Palin proves the point that very high office is not the place for intellectually mediocre people. Her personality is engaging, and she is an attractive woman, and that may help her likeablity quotient, at least at first glance. She's not threatening to the average person, they can see themselves in her. But average people can not do jobs that really require above average abilities. I do not denigrate the office of VP or president, by believing that anyone can function well in those jobs--they require an above average degree of intelligence and ability to conceptualize and think abstractly.
Carter may not have been a particularly effective president, but he is an extremely intelligent man. So was Truman. Even Bush is not quite the idiot that people make him out to be, and a lot of his folksy manner is really an act. Bill Clinton was a Rhodes Scholar--he is a very bright man. Even Dan Quayle, certainly the butt of many jokes, is a well educated, intelligent man.
Offhand, I can't think of anyone as ill prepared as Palin, in terms of mental ability, who has run for such high office in my lifetime. I can see why the Republicans have tried to keep her from opening her mouth in any situation that is not scripted for her.
Being governor of Alaska does not appear to be an intellectually demanding or challenging job. She can understand the rather limited range of issues she deals with, although how well she understands them may be open to question. And, in Alaska, she seems to have tried dodging situations where she would have to have any indepth interactions with people where she would have to display her reasoning skills. Just because she is a governor, does not mean she is even on a par with other governors, because Alaska is a rather unique state in many respects. She got into office as a "reformer" and her reforming seems to have been little more than firing the old guys and replacing them with her friends. As mayor of tiny Wasilla, she had to hire a city administrator to help her do her job.
Again, it is not just the experience factor. The more Palin opens her mouth and comments on issues or policies, the more people cringe. It is not that she lacks experience, it is that she lacks reasoning ability and intellectual depth. Her thinking is fuzzy, shallow, confused, and at times incoherent. This is not just due to her lack of specific acquired knowledge, it reflects something about her basic mental abilities.
I don't even want to think about the possibility that she might be elected VP. I care too much about my country to even want to entertain that possibility.
