Perhaps. But you beg the question: How do you quantify sensibility? Academic success and intellectual accomplishments are easily identified and understood. Sensibility like you attribute to your grandfather is much less so. As a matter of fact, without intimately knowing someone, I’d say it would be impossible to gauge. Even knowing someone, it’s extremely subjective and IMHO unreliable.
While I value education, have worked in the field at the collegiate level in the classroom, have always advised students and young friends to pursue an education as far as they can, and have used it as a factor in hiring in my own business, I also have perspective on its limitations.
How does one judge the performance of an individual with a myriad of degrees certifications etc. until they actually perform their job? Certainly academic success can demonstrate the ability to complete tasks of varying levels of difficulty. You get a known quantity certainly, but will it apply to the task at hand.
It is like I used to tell my new hires fresh from school. You have the degree or certs so I know you can use the terms properly in a sentence, now lets see if you can actually do something with it.
Looking back one who places so high a price on education above all else would have dismissed Ronald Reagan as having mediocre abilities at best and William Jefferson Clinton as being an all-star.
We see how that worked out.
I give the same deference to Palin. I don't know if I will support her in the long run, but a lack of educational bonafides or "ivy" (got it right that time) league credentials does not make her an idiot nor does a lack of knowledge in certain areas make her an ignoramus. Indeed to rise to the level she has in her career does require at least a modicum of ability and intelligence regardless of the political persuasion. Furthermore dismissing her for those reason is exactly her strength in many ways. It is always the one you least expect that tend to get you in the end.