Comparing her to a treasonous incompetent doesn't render her qualified, at least by my standards. Any such metric is subjective anyway.
I hold military CIC as a high fraction of presidential responsibilities. I'm with Patton there, especially as regards having read the classics in many fields by which to understand the context of the present. One simply cannot understand the guy across the table with whom one is negotiating or across the battlefield without knowing his country's history.
One simply cannot understand what is wrong with regulation of manufacturing without having learned how manufacturing works. Look at how Reagan traveled the country to learn exactly that. Look at how he studied Montesquieu, or Locke.
Reagan was nobody's "amiable dunce" because he had done his homework for years with his feet in many a manufacturing plant, and DID NOT rely upon his advisers to tell him what to think (think "tear down this wall," which his advisers tried to cut from the speech). Such is exactly my criticism of her in that I believe the RINOs think they can lead her down the primrose path with a clauqe of whispering "experts." She just hasn't done that background work with which to develop an appropriate ground of skepticism.
Simply quoting Hayek doesn't mean one has grasped Hayek, or any other pivotal philosopher. For example, I'm reading up on Titus Lucretius Carus. Why, is he obscure. Well, to the philosophers who were informing the founders of this country, absolutely not; he was pivotal. I simply see no sign of that kind of curiosity in Sarah Palin in any field.
I can think of one off the top of my head right away: energy policy.
I can think of a second which is her passion for the right to life and how it was reflected not in her religious and personal views but how readily she embraced motherhood to a child with Down's Syndrome and became an advocate for parents of children with special needs.
In both of these areas, her curiosity and passions were real and from within.