Unlike most of you out there who originate from a politically comfortable recliner: states like Washington, Oregon or even New York: I have had to deal with Sarah Palin for the past 12 years.

While you ladies and gents were waiting for a “major gaffe” during the vice presidential debate, I was scrutinizing over the minutiae: how she spins her accomplishments as mayor and governor; how she doesn’t speak for herself, uttering long-winded sentences that say nothing at all: you only hear the PR regurgitated to her by mother GOP; how she keeps her friends close and her political friends closer.

She’s not going to slip on a blunder peel any time soon, so cast those pipe dreams aside. She will, however, feed you a ton of cutely-worded phrases and carefully-crafted punch-lines that won’t tell you a thing about what she wants to do, what she cares about and why it matters.

Perhaps since I’m from Alaska, I should recap a few of Palin’s adventures in the Last Frontier: yes, that’s our state motto, and our state flower is the forget-me-not.

Palin was voted into office for two reasons: First, Alaska is over 60 percent Republican, and second, she ran on an ethics-reform platform after the guy that preceded her, Frank Murkowski, bought a private plane with public pennies: 270 billion of them, I might add.

I am offended when people call Palin “smart.” Palin is only “smart” if by “smart” you mean doing the obvious in a comfortable situation or speaking a 20-some word incomprehensible sentence that serves the purpose of being indirectly deceitful by not even attempting to answer the question. Palin is not smart.

Now, I know some of you will say, as Eddie Izzard would, “einen minuten bitte!” (“Hold on a minute, please” in choppy German) and cite sensitivity, saying that I can’t make a judgment call on her intelligence. I’ve spoken to her in person, and have spoken to her campaign people many times, and she did not emanate the slightest degree of intelligence, nor did she prove that she had the slightest idea what she was talking about.

My interview with Palin in 2006 when I worked for the Anchorage Daily News, was about student issues. When I asked her if and how she would alleviate rising college tuition costs, she told me she “had a good appreciation of the cost of tuition these days”…since she’s a mother who’s about to send her son off to college.

The only part of that sentence that is correct is the part about her being a mother. The rest of it is incorrect. She can’t have a “good appreciation” of college costs when her son, Track (I refereed his hockey games for several years, not fun), planned to enroll in the U.S. Army only months later.

Less than two weeks ago, she said the following in response to Katie Couric’s question regarding whether the $700 billion bailout would’ve been better spent injecting capital into the middle class rather than buying bad assets of failing financial institutions:
“That’s why I say, I, like every American I’m speaking with, we’re ill about this position that we have been put in, where it is the taxpayers looking to bailout. But, ultimately, what the bailout does is help those who are concerned about the health care reform that is needed to help shore up our economy, helping the… It’s gotta be all about job creation too, shoring up our economy and putting it on the right track. So, health care reform and reducing taxes and reigning in spending has got to accompany tax reductions and tax relief for Americans and trade. We’ve got to see trade as opportunity, not as a competitive, scary thing, but one in five jobs being created in the trade sector today, we’ve got to look at that as more opportunity. All those things under the umbrella of job creation, this bailout is a part of that.”

Huh? My grammar check is livid right now!

How in the world do you link a financial bailout to health care reform? Like my friend commented, “You have to go through an infinite number of illogical connections to make that happen.”

And job creation, reducing taxes, reigning in spending accompanied by tax reductions and tax relief? And trade as an opportunity instead of a competition? Competition is the exact principle upon which capitalism is based!

The reason she didn’t slip up during the debate was because she’s been coached by the best debater money can buy on the McCain staff, and so she should: Joe Biden had Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm help him out.

But even after the debate, Palin will still need coaching. She can’t cost the McCain camp any more incredulity votes after trying to be smart by throwing the Bush doctrine question back in Charlie Gibson’s face, or not being able to name any other Supreme Court decision besides Roe v. Wade, or claiming that Freddie and Fannie had been, for the past few years, a taxpayer burden (sorry, Sarah, they just became one).

The two best conservative columnists in the U.S., David Brooks of The New York Times and George Will of The Washington Post, have now come out hard against Palin.

In 2005, when Palin announced that she’d vie for Alaska’s top CEO position: our governor doesn’t really run a state, rather a socialized petroleum company where the shareholders each get a slice of the company’s return: I warned my father of the hazard she posed to the Alaskan constitution, party-divide and shareholders of the 659,000 square mile company. After she was elected, my dad, regrettably, became part of the 95 percent of her gubernatorial approval rating.

I had a conversation with him last week. He admitted that at the time, he didn’t see the forest for the trees. About a quarter of Alaskans were in his boat. Now her approval rating is down to around 60 percent.

Luckily, I have yet to fathom any circumstance where Palin actually becomes our vice-president. Hopefully, come Nov. 2, I won’t have to.