Don't think of names, think of principles.

I've been witnessing many calls for Palin/Jindal '12 or Jindal/Palin '12, but I feel it's important to remind conservatives not to wed themselves to particular candidates right now. These candidates may be more effective in '16 or '20. Other good candidates may emerge for '12, and we should not make any assumptions now. Be patient. Work on the principles. And if we succeed in that, the best candidates will emerge naturally in '12.

The people have spoken: Obama would be the more experienced vice presidential candidate... barely.

AllahPundit at Hot Air comments on a new Rasmussen poll which shows that unaffiliated voters find Obama to be more experienced than Palin by only a 5% margin (42% to 37%). And mind you, this poll was taken before Palin's big speech at the RNC.

AP quickly makes the point that the difference is bigger when all voters are counted (49% to 39%), because "unaffiliateds are likely to include more disaffected conservatives than liberals these days". I agree, but McCain needs to win over these disaffected conservatives as much as he needs crossover votes. Some of them may technically consider themselves undecideds, and others may needs some excitement to get off their butts and get to the polls on Election Day.

Of course the most fun out of all of this is thinking about the embarrassment of the Obama campaign. Voters view the best case of their ticket as being barely more experienced than the worst case of their opponents' ticket.

Sarah Palin speech energy highlight.

Nicely tying energy independence to foreign policy:

With Russia wanting to control a vital pipeline in the Caucasus and to divide and intimidate our European allies by using energy as a weapon, we cannot leave ourselves at the mercy of foreign suppliers.

Russia wants to control the supply of oil and spike prices with militaristic adventures? Well, they can't reap the benefits of such attacks if a large flowing oil supply is safe, far from their reach.

Does Sarah Palin's experience matter more than that of past candidates?

I've seen the following take on Sarah Palin's experience floating around in a couple of places:

With voters concerned about McCain's age and his history of skin cancer, it remains to be seen whether they will be reassured by a woman with little to no experience on the federal stage who is a heartbeat away from the presidency.

Let us remember, however, that half of all presidents who have died in office have died from assassination, not natural causes.

If we take the past data as indicative of the current odds of death while in office (not a safe assumption given the small sample size and the time differences between sampling, though it's the best information available), then the average president could be said to have a 9.3% chance of dying by assassination while in office and a 9.3% chance of dying from natural causes, or an 18.6% chance overall. If we take John McCain to be 50% more likely than average to die from natural causes (probably an overestimate), then his odds of dying in office would be 23.25%, a less than 5% difference.

As I admitted, this statistical data is unreliable. Perhaps fewer than 50% of presidents who die in office in the long run die from assassination. It is possible that the real figure may be more than 50%. However, it is clear that assassins kill a significant number of presidents. At best, health and age combined have only a fractional impact on the likelihood of a president dying in office. In the other instances, Barack Obama is no safer than John McCain. So while Sarah Palin's experience is a valid issue, it should not be much more significant than that of any other VP candidate.

Update: There's an examination of a similar topic in the WSJ Best of the Web. They kind of flip the topic on its head, though, and compare the likelihood of the two more experienced candidates serving as president by the end of the term (McCain versus Biden). They don't account for the high risk of assassination that all presidents face, however, which should bring both McCain and Obama's chances of death in office closer to the mean than if only considering the SSA data.

h/t RedState