A letter writer on the East Coast responds to a snarky renark:

"What was Obama scoring high in? Votes. Millions and millions of them. He won the primaries, remember? Sarah Palin won the mayorality with 600 votes and the governorship with about 120,000 votes.

People with open minds listened to him, read about him, and learned who he was - had a somewhat turbulent childhood, got scholarships to go to good schools and excelled at those schools. He was the first AA to named Editor of the Harvard Law Review, a prestigious position for the best and the brightest that was noted in papers and magazines nation wide. He graduated magna cum laude from Harvard. The man is brilliant. (Have you heard that McCain graduated 894 out of 899 at the naval academy? A school he got into only because of his family? Like George Bush?)

After Columbia, he worked as a community organizer (gasp!) in Chicago, as Director of the Developing Communities Project (DCP), a church-based community organization to help the poor and disadvantaged and unemployed. While director grew their budget from $70,000 to $400,000 and the DCP staff from 1 to 13 that are still working on those poor streets of Chicago to help people.

After Harvard, he wrote a best selling memoir, worked for a civil rights law firm, and was a professor of constitutional law at the prestigious University of Chicago. (Gosh, wouldn't it be nice to have a president that understands and upholds the constitution?) He also was a State Senator in the Illinois legislature for eight years where he passed important legislation such as better health care for children and mandatory taping of prisoner interrogations among many others. He wrote another best selling book and in 2004 was elected to the U.S. Senate.

In the Senate he sponsored or co-sponsored 570 bills in the 109th and 110th Congress, 15 of which have become law, and he has also introduced amendments to 50 bills, of which 16 were adopted by the Senate. His record is impressive for a junior Senator from Illinois.
Most of his legislative effort has been in the areas of:
- Energy Efficiency and Climate Change (25 bills)
- Health care (21 bills) and public health (20 bills)
- Consumer protection/labor (14 bills)
- The needs of Veterans and the Armed Forces (13 bills)
- Congressional Ethics and Accountability (12 bills)
- Foreign Policy (10 bills)
- Voting and Elections (9 bills)
- Education (7 bills)
- Hurricane Katrina Relief (6)
- The Environment (5 bills)
- Homeland Security (4 bills)
- Discrimination (4 bills)

Go ahead. Compare Sarah's record to that. Mayor of a town of about 6,000 (there were far more than that in the area of Chicago where Obama was working hands-on with the poor and he was doing it on a salary of $13,000, not $68,000). Governor of a state with less than 700,000 people and was fortunate to be there when there was a huge spike in oil prices globally which she had absolutely nothing to do with but certainly benefitted from. There's a reason why Obama has a huge advantage among the better educated and better informed voters and that reason is obvious when you read the posts from most right wingers on various blogs.

— sharon