Something that I thought of today:

I read an article on my Yahoo! Homepage entitled "Palin meets her first world leaders in New York", and one of the main points in the article was that Palin has extremely limited foreign policy experience and has been shielded from the media so it doesn't ask her questions that will make her sound, well, inexperienced in foreign policy.

"Palin is studying foreign policy ahead of her one debate with Democratic vice presidential candidate Joe Biden, a senator with deep credentials on that front. More broadly, the Republican ticket is trying to counter questions exploited by Democrats about her qualifications to serve as vice president and step into the presidency at a moment's notice if necessary."

What my question is, though, is how is Barack Obama much more qualified in the foreign policy area? Sure he lived in other countries when he was 10 years old, but how does that translate into "experience" for a president? Perhaps his short time as a Senator qualifies as "experience". A quick Google search for "obama's foreign policy experience" brings up some interesting articles – many are from before the Democratic nomination was set, so many of them are Hillary Clinton's attack on Obama for his lack of experience (which is interesting, because she really doesn't have much experience, either). It seems like on the Democrat side, there the President has limited experience and the vice-president has many years of experience. Vice-versa for the Republican side

Time "Obama's Foreign-Policy Problem"

Huffington Post "Clinton Mocks Obama on Foreign Policy"

Boston.com "Obama foreign policy claim stirs controversy"

Also, on DemocraticUnderground.com (a Democrat-support page), one of the posts details Obama's experience in two categories "Some of the countries he has visited while Senator" and "Here is a list of some of those who worked with Bill Clinton who are now on Barack Obama's (campaign) team". My question regarding this is does travel to another country through a Congressionally-sponsored trip equate with experience? (most of the places on the list are in Africa, a few in the Middle East, and Russia) – Just what did the Senators do on those trips? And with regards to Obama's "teammates" who are experienced in the foreign policy game: How is that relevant? There are also many, many foreign policy pundits who are "on McCain's team"…how does having supporters equate with experience? All candidates have advisers, so the claim of "look how many influential people support candidate ____" just does not mean anything. Just questions…and of course forum posts are not the most reliable source.

I suppose what I really am saying is while Palin may not have much foreign policy experience, she is "only" the vice-presidential candidate, whereas Obama also has little foreign policy experience (visiting a country does not equal policy experience) and is running for president. The ones with lots experience, both in foreign and domestic policy, here are McCain and Biden.