A huge difference, really.

Sarah Palin was appointed by someone, either John McCain, the DNC, or a group of conservative activists. But how she got to where she is pales in importance to the possible result of her candidacy.

Barack Obama reached his position as the Democratic candidate for President after a year-long primary over the entire United States and other protectorates who voted in the primaries. He ran against all that chose to compete for the presidential nomination, a total of ten candidates, I believe. Many of those candidates had extensive experience in government and/or business. He traveled to all those places, communicated his platform to the electorate, debated all the candidates, some of them several times. He even traveled outside the U.S., where the possibility of his election here was enthusiastically met with crowds numbered in the hundreds of thousands in many places. It was the American electorate who selected Barack Obama as one of the candidates for President. They considered his qualifications and experience, evaluated his campaign platform, and his ability to lead and motivate. After all that, he WON the nomination in free and fair elections in which almost one-third of the entire U.S. population chose to vote. He is not an appointee.

You can play around with language and italics as you please. But the fact remains that two candidates could ultimately wind up as President of the United States, under different circumstances, of course. One reached that position as the result of convincing a majority of voters of his qualifications, judgement, platform and ability to lead. The other is a complete unknown who many believe was appointed either as a political expediency or to satisfy the demands of conservative political special interests.

For me--I'll take the winner of the free and fair competition who has already demonstrated his ability to lead and motivate large numbers of Americans over the period of a long campaign. I'll take a pass on the chance that a totally unknown candidate, one who is clearly and admittedly unqualified to assume the position of leader of the free world, could unexpectedly land in the oval office.