Democrats and their party’s activist wing, known as the White House press corps, have had a lot of fun belittling Sarah Palin’s experience as a city council member and mayor of Wasilla, Alaska. How many times have we heard that the population is just 9,000?(Just how many people lived in the public-housing projects that Obama organized? Nevermind.)Maybe Palin’s small-town governing experience is more worthwhile than the press wants to admit.Writing in U.S. News and World Report, Andrew Langer ^[1], president of the Institute for Liberty,  makes an interesting point about accountability:If the belief is that only policy made at the federal level is complex and grants experience to the policymaker, then how can one be trusted to ensure that policies that have to be implemented at the state and local level (i.e., unfunded mandates and the like) are reasonable and limited?The answer is, they can’t.

Local government comes with its own set of experience-accruing difficulties. It can be just as complex, the stakes just as high, but without the glamour that comes from being a member of the House, or a senator for two or 36 years. In fact, it has the potential to be much harder, for two reasons.First, you’re governing not just in the public spotlight but in and around and with your constituents. There is no buffer between you and the public if you’re a small-town or small-county executive. When you make a decision that people don’t like, you hear about it. You get phone calls, you get approached in the supermarket, people walk up to your front porch or back fence. This is just one of the reasons many local political parties have trouble at times finding people to run for office—it is tremendously stressful to be so easily accessible.Joe Biden sees real people on the train to and from Delaware, and he sees people in carefully scheduled events in the state itself. But when was the last time that Biden made a tough vote to curtail the funding for some project affecting his constituents and then had to go do his family shopping at the local grocery store? When was the last time Obama made a decision to enact some new regulatory scheme affecting small business and got approached while he was weeding in his front yard to hear complaints about it?