Since when did Barack Obama value experience so highly?

Barack Obama’s campaign is blasting John McCain for putting “the former mayor of a town of 9,000 with zero foreign policy experience a heartbeat away from the presidency.”

The scathing description of Sarah Palin, from Obama spokesman Bill Burton, comes as Democrats scramble to gather a response to a selection that nobody in the political world expected.

“Governor Palin shares John McCain’s commitment to overturning Roe v. Wade, the agenda of Big Oil and continuing George Bush’s failed economic policies — that’s not the change we need, it’s just more of the same,” added Burton.

What a desperate statement!  Here’s Barack Obama on his massive foreign-policy credentials:

To counter opponents’ accusations that he lacks experience in foreign policy, Senator Barack Obama of Illinois often cites his ties to relatives in poor villages in Kenya and the years he spent growing up in Indonesia. Now he has added a new personal detail to that résumé: a trip to Pakistan while a college student.

Wow.  So his mother took him to live in Indonesia when he was eight, and he took a trip in college.  Meanwhile, Palin has governed a state surrounded by foreign nations.  Which has the practical experience in foreign policy and diplomacy?

During the entire primary campaign, Obama kept telling voters that his judgment overruled his lack of experience.  Now, suddenly, it doesn’t — but that puts Barack Obama at the same level as Sarah Palin, or even below, as Palin has the executive experience that Obama lacks.   Moreover, Palin has spent her time in politics actually accomplishing reform and challenging the political machine in her own party.  Did Obama do that?

And let’s not forget that Palin is running for the Vice Presidency.  Obama, with his complete lack of the experience his campaign now suddenly believes is crucial for the job, wants to be President.

This is a foolish, bitter, and tone-deaf message.  As one source close to the McCain campaign put it, “We already know what Barack Obama thinks about small town America. But the bitterness of the Obama campaign’s knee jerk attack says more about them than anything else.”