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"I'm 57 and before I knew that he was a running for president, he was a actor and he was my favorite male actor."

You do realize Reagan was Governor of California for two terms, don't you? Bit of a hole in the resume, eh! 1966-1974. Which means, if you're 57 today, you were born in 1953, so you were 13 years old when he became governor. Most of his movies predated WWII, and his last was The Killers in 1964. In parallel with his final years as an actor, he was president of the Screen Actors' Guild, Hollywood's major union for film performers, and it was there that he honed his negotiation and executive skills, swimming with the bloodthirstiest sharks in an industry awash with money, risk and corruption. That came in handy when he faced down Gorbachev in Reykjavik. He played the man like a bass fiddle, in fact.

My point is that with Reagan there was real substance, judgment and experience. And so it is with Palin. Both are routinely derided by their enemies as possessing nothing but weightless fluff and a winning way with the rubes. I value your support of Palin, and you'll score more points with people on the fence if you can speak of her accomplishments and skills rather than her oratory and presence. So let's get started!

and it was there that he honed his negotiation and executive skills, swimming with the bloodthirstiest sharks in an industry awash with money, risk and corruption.

Not to mention that he had to deal with serious run-ins with real-life Communist agitators -- which, as you note, seasoned him for his later dealings with the Russians.

And he spent years on GE's payroll, traveling around the country speaking to groups of employees -- he wrote his own stuff -- and that's how he learned to connect with normal people.

I value your support of Palin, and you'll score more points with people on the fence if you can speak of her accomplishments and skills rather than her oratory and presence.

Even on that point it's best to have a valid point of comparison. If you want to compare her oratory with Reagan's it's best to start when Reagan was her age, with his Eureka College commencement address (1957). Read the speech: sure, there's oratory and presence -- but there is also a mature and well-conceived theme to the address, ideas that the later Reagan would put into practice.

It's really not fair to compare Sarah Palin's offerings even to that college commencement address. Perhaps it's just a sign of the times, but Sarah Palin's speeches have much more in common with the "gotcha" style of modern punditry, than they do with Reagan's focus on the Big Ideas.

It's a weakness Sarah Palin has to work very hard to address.