Project Cluck / Part One: Commitment

“I’ve already decided, but it takes Tim a little longer to get committed,” I heard my wife say on the phone to a friend this morning. Whether the central assertion of her statement is true or not is a question for the ages; my immediate need was to figure out exactly what I would eventually be committing to. “The coop tour was great,” she said next, “it was so fun seeing all the different kinds of chickens. It’s going to be really hard to decide which kind to get.” So I guess we’re getting some chickens.

A couple of Saturdays ago we spent about half a day visiting chicken coops, as part of a tour sponsored by Seattle Tilth (www.seattletilth.org). It actually was terrific fun, meeting proud chicken owners and seeing their gardens, coops and chickens…and dogs, cats, goats, etc. The appeal of the whole thing is undeniable. There’s something transfixing about watching hens scuttle about the yard, making funny little sounds; they appear quite self-actualized, especially when, based on how tiny their heads are, it’s not likely there’s a lot going on inside them.

In Seattle, you can have up to three hens (no roosters), plus one additional hen per thousand square feet of land. Because lots of people ask, yes, hens will lay eggs even if there is no rooster about, but said eggs contain no chicks. And –OK, this is odd – you can tell what color eggs a hen will lay based on the color of the feathers on their earlobes. There are a lot of things about the anatomy of the hen I’d rather not know, but it honestly never occurred to me that they have earlobes, let alone that the feathers on them mean anything. Also, other than color, there is no difference between eggs of different shades.

Chickens in America lay about 75 billion eggs a year, about ten per cent of the global total, and we consume over 99% of them here in the US. So each year, American hens (that is, hens living in America) produce roughly 250 eggs per person. Yikes. About sixty per cent of these eggs are used by consumers; the rest are used in processed foods (~30%) and the foodservice industry (~10%). Chinese chickens lay 390 billion eggs a year – about 293 per person. (I’ve heard but have not verified that General Tso’s chicken in particular lays very tasty eggs.) China’s chickens lead the world; I’m not sure if that’s on a per-hen basis or if they just have more chickens. My guess: American hens are the best educated, most productive ones on the planet.

(Click on this link to learn more about chickens and eggs: http://tiny.cc/iShDA. Two caveats: First, the videos are a bit disturbing – not in a PETA sort of way, so no worries there. There’s just something alarmingly earnest (Midwestern?) about the two laptop-toting “students” who guide us through Egg Facts 101, but the Introduction is a “must see.” Second, the American Egg Board, to whose site this link takes you, is not so concerned with the whole “which came first?” part of the conversation, so don’t go looking for that level of discourse on their site. The AEB are the people who bring you the “incredible edible egg” campaign. And we won’t be joining, unless we start buying up the whole neighborhood and tearing down houses – you need 75,000 layers to join. (Our little rambler sits on a 5,980 square foot lot; if we can only have one extra hen per 1,000 feet, we’d need another 15,000 lots at 5,000 square feet each – about 1,722 acres.)

But here’s the thing: based on what I’ve learned thus far about how many eggs a hen can lay in a year, there’s pretty much one hen out there for each of us. And so if there’s a chicken out there laying eggs for me, why shouldn’t it live in my backyard? Perhaps this is part of the appeal of the whole thing – talking to chicken owners; you get an overwhelming sense that having hens is just really satisfying. I wonder if it’s not partly because there’s this happy symbiosis between households and hens? It’s pretty cool, really. And that’s before you start thinking about the living conditions many hens endure, carbon footprint, and all the other stuff we’ve become conditioned to consider as consumers.

I’ll keep you posted on our progress.

The Espresso Dilemma (Solved!!)

It’s now been five months since my unplanned departure from Starbucks. Of the many adjustments I’ve had to make, several concern coffee acquisition and consumption. Specifically, what products are out there that I’ll like, and how much should I expect to pay for them?

I really like coffee, and I have a bit of a caffeine dependency. I’m not one of those people who drink coffee all day long. I drink more coffee than the average person, but no more than the average coffee drinker. Chances are, if you drink coffee, you drink about 3 cups a day. There is obviously a sense in which caffeine is addictive, but unless you consider crankiness antisocial behavior or believe people resort to crime to feed their habit, it’s hard to make the case that caffeine is addictive in the same way other drugs are. Of course people in the coffee business discuss this whole topic only reluctantly and always euphemistically. “Habituating mood-enhancer,” a phrase I heard from someone at one of Starbucks’s many ad agencies over the years, is perhaps my favorite way to express our reliance on coffee. (Rule of thumb: if you work for Starbucks, you never use an apostrophe with Starbucks, in any situation, for any reason; once you’ve left, you’re on your own to run with this as far as your apostrophal comfort will take you.)

But aside from dependency, for which a wicked, debilitating headache is pretty much the worst-case outcome, the whole matter of paying for coffee is something I’ve had to confront. As a Starbucks employee, one of my benefits was a free pound of coffee every week. In addition to that, I was entitled to a 30% discount in Starbucks stores and could drink all the coffee I wanted at the office, including espresso beverages.

This brings up the whole question of value, which is one of the big business challenges facing Starbucks right now. When coffee is free or deeply discounted, it’s easy to forget what customers pay for it. Over the years, as Starbucks added dozens and dozens of flavors, new drink “platforms” and expanded nationally, it was really easy to have essentially no idea what customers were paying. Prices differed from market to market, but not always in ways you might assume – an area where costs might be higher may also have more competition, which would put downward pressure on prices. Areas with little competition created different issues: in some respects, Starbucks was basically able to establish the value of specialty coffee products in such markets. This opened the door to less sophisticated startups, who could simply match Starbucks pricing, getting premiums they had not earned, and to others who saw the opportunity to undercut the out-of-towners.

One of the first times I really had to think about this question of value was in my early years at Starbucks, when Howard Behar, one of the legendary leaders of the company, wanted to change one feature of the discount policy. In those days, employees were entitled to free beverages, anytime, in any store, whether you were working or not. Howard felt it was important, for a variety of reasons, that we pay at least a discounted price for drinks when we weren’t working. It was pretty controversial – by definition, it seemed to be a “takeaway” – always unpopular. I recall debating this with a colleague who worked in restaurant sales, which meant he spent a lot of time on the road and that he would potentially be affected more than most people. In the end, his admission that it would no longer be worthwhile for him to pull off the freeway for a cup of coffee if it cost him a dollar pretty much proved Howard’s point to me.

So while I always appreciated the value and quality of Starbucks coffee, over the course of almost 22 years, I got used to paying $X for coffee. So now it’s difficult for me to see anything but those discounted prices as the appropriate cost of the product. And the overwhelming majority of the coffee I drank – all that I drank at the office and what I made at home with my free pound – were essentially free. And as the years went by, like a lot of Starbucks customers, I pretty much quit making coffee at home except for on weekends.

My new lifestyle calls for coffee just about every morning at home. I generally make caffe lattes – one with two shots of espresso for my wife and a second for myself, with four shots. (Rule of Thumb: A single shot of espresso has about 75 milligrams of caffeine, about double the amount in a can of Cola. Most things I’ve read suggest limiting daily caffeine intake to 600 milligrams. Check out http://tiny.cc/19gqL to learn more, including how many Kit Kat bars or cans of Red Bull it’d take to kill you.)

My weekly demand for coffee at home is about 294 grams (6 shots x 7 grams x 7 days.) At $10 a pound, (at the low end of regular pricing for good coffee,) that’s about $6.50 a week for coffee beans, and coincidentally about what it would cost for the drinks each day at Starbucks and its competitors. Which reminds me of the first moment during my time at Starbucks when I could see that the business was changing before our eyes. I was managing the store at University Village in Seattle, which was then (and remains) one of the highest volume stores in the portfolio. It was around 1989 or 90, during a time when we sold 1,000-1,400 pounds of coffee by the pound each week. On a Saturday morning, one of the busiest times of the week, a couple came in and ordered a half-pound of Espresso Roast, ground for their home espresso machine, and two double-tall lattes to drink while they shopped at the nearby grocery store. Their purchase totaled $8.20 -- $4.10 for the two drinks and $4.10 for the half pound of coffee. It struck me at that moment that people were happy to spend as much for something that would be gone before they got home as they were for something that would likely be fueling a week’s worth of early mornings. Today’s Starbucks store at University Village is about four times the size it was when I managed it, does probably three times the business, but sells a fraction as much coffee by the pound.

Coffee was only a small part of my life when I joined Starbucks. My wife and I moved to Seattle in 1985. Coffee was already a bigger deal in Seattle than it had been in Phoenix, but nothing like it would eventually become. We had acquired a small espresso machine for home use and frequented the espresso cart at Nordstrom. Up to the time I joined Starbucks, I probably would not have self-identified as a coffee drinker. I liked it alright, but even then I could tell a lot of it wasn’t any good. When I joined Starbucks and began learning about coffee, the taste and style of Starbucks became the lens through which I saw all coffee. That I had the opportunity over the years to really get to know coffee and learn about from the inside, from industry pioneers and in a really fun environment meant only solidified the notion that Starbucks = Coffee. Of course I knew there were other good coffees out there – few at first, then arguably fewer – but now, it seems safe to say there is more good coffee available in the US than any time in the last quarter century, if not longer.

Which brings me to the Espresso Dilemma. Starbucks Espresso Roast is a really terrific blend of coffee, and its taste is so imprinted in my brain and on my tongue that it’s hard to embrace much else. But I have to pay for it now – I bought a pound yesterday, for $10.45. That’s about 97 cents a day for our lattes at home, which is hard not to see as a bargain. Yet – when you’re used to free and you’re unemployed, $10.45 seems like a lot. And frankly, there is part of me that would like to see less of my money go to Starbucks right now. I loved my time there; it was terrific fun most of the time, and Starbucks gave me a chance to see huge chunks of the world and meet famous people. Even so, it’s fun to explore other coffees, and given all that has changed at Starbucks and the rest of the coffee world, saying Starbucks = Coffee no longer works for me.

And so I’ve been trying different coffees at home to make our daily lattes. I’ve acquired coffee in a number of different ways, and for lack of a better way to summarize my findings; I’ll group them by method of acquisition, which essentially revolves around price.

Free. When it comes to free, economists and marketers agree: price matters, and free is a price most people can live with. I count myself among those happy with free. So on a couple of occasions when former Starbucks colleagues have offered me a pound of coffee, I’ve chosen Espresso Roast and found myself in possession of one of my favorite things at one of my favorite prices.

One rainy spring morning, a friend and I headed out on a little tour of Seattle coffeehouses. We visited Café Vita on Capitol Hill here in Seattle and had a lovely time. One of the employees noticed us looking carefully at things, including bags of coffee stored in the retail area and he offered us a tour of the roastery and warehouse, both of which are located behind the café. It was terrific fun and he gave us each a bag of a new blend they’d just come out with, a sort of joint venture they have going with Theo Chocolates. It was a nice gesture and the blend worked nicely for my lattes at home. Theo is an interesting Seattle company, and their partnership with Café Vita is a perfect fit. You can read a bit more at http://tiny.cc/f0xDt.

Shortly after the coffeehouse tour, I was having coffee with another former colleague, Joe Fugere, owner of Tutta Bella Pizza in Seattle (and now Issaquah.) (www.tuttabella.com) Like both Joe and everything on the menu, the coffee at Tutta Bella is authentically Italian. (Joe is actually not Italian, but he is very authentic; based on the respect he enjoys from the Italian barista in the Columbia City restaurant and the surprising number of Italians coming in for coffee, he might as well be.) Joe uses Attibassi Espresso from Italy, which he and his team selected after trying just about every coffee around. Read a bit about the coffee here: http://tiny.cc/g8IiT. For a person of my background, using this coffee at home was nothing short of scandalous. Like most Italian espresso blends, this coffee includes some robusta beans. (Rule of Thumb: Over 70% of the coffee in the world is arabica, the generally-regarded-as-superior of the two commercially important species of coffee. But there’s plenty of bad arabica out there, and most lousy coffee in the US is lousy not because of robusta, but because of stale, cheap, crappy versions of the good stuff.)

I had a cappuccino at Tutta Bella, and it was carefully prepared, beautiful to look at, and very tasty. It was easy to tell that there was some robusta in the blend, but the claim that these beans add body and aid the formation of a lovely crema on top of the espresso clearly seems to be true. Both these things, along with Joe’s graciousness and the barista’s skill, made it easy to say yes when Joe offered me a bag of the coffee to use at home.

To be frank, I struggled with the coffee when I used it at home. The home machine I have, like all home machines, is no match for a great commercial unit like they have at Tutta Bella. (My home model is a fairly new machine Starbucks sold, the name of which I can’t even begin to conjure up…I do remember there was a big marketing push behind it and that some of the design work was apparently done by BMW.) It’s a decent and reliable machine, and the espresso shots made from the Attibassi beans looked beautiful. The taste, however, was a bit disconcerting to me. The flavor of the robusta beans is just plain foreign to me and I couldn’t get past it. My wife had no trouble with it, I should say, and that means quite a lot in that she takes her latte at more “normal” strength and is a pretty observant drinker. (In fact, her strongest negative reaction to date has been the morning I opened a fresh bag of Starbucks – she found it harsh compared to whatever we’d drunk the prior day.)

To this point, the answer to the price/value question is a resounding “Duh”: Free coffee is good, at least when you know the people I do. There are no doubt gifts of coffee out there so heinous that I would not drink them; however, I believe that receiving a gift graciously is a mark of maturity, as is knowing what to do with gifts others may make better use of.

Not free. After carefully researching the matter, I’ve come to the conclusion that all coffee is either free or it’s not free. The price of free coffee seems to be fixed at $0.00. (I wonder if we need the government to investigate this. Collusion?) There is WAY more price variability in coffee that is not free, largely due to the ongoing practice of price discounting in grocery stores.

I’m fond of grocery shopping, all things considered. I rarely go more than a few days without at least a quick trip to the store—I prefer to buy produce no more than a day or two before its intended use, and when I’m cooking dinner, I don’t generally plan the meal several days in advance. (You never know what you’re going to be in the mood for, and when you have the luxury of time, it makes sense to use it.) So now that I have to buy most of my coffee, I’ve gotten in the habit of checking coffee prices regularly.

There is pretty much always something on sale, either in the bulk bins or within the packaged coffee selections. I’ve come to the conclusion that there’s just too much risk involved in buying coffee from the bins in grocery stores – the risk of stale coffee just seems too great. Not only is it impossible to know how long the coffee has been in the bins, it’s unclear to me how fresh the coffee they use to refill the bins really is. And even good coffee tastes lousy when it’s stale.

Most of the pre-packaged coffee in grocery stores is sold in 12-ounce bags. I know that a one pound bag (16 ounces / 454 grams) of Starbucks Espresso Roast costs $10.45 at a Starbucks store. That’s just sixty-five cents an ounce, so unless I am getting something really good or paying a very low price, the one-pounder at Starbucks is my default. The coffees I like – such as Peet’s, (Major Dickason’s Blend, sold for $13.95/lb at Peet’s stores; www.peets.com) some of Café Vita’s blends (especially Café Luna, sold for $13.50/lb in their café; www.cafevita.com) and a few others, are usually $9.99-11.99 for the 12-ounce bag. This translates to $13.32 to $15.98 per pound. So basically, the threat of a crushing caffeine withdrawal-induced headache is the only rational reason for me to pay for coffee if it’s not “on deal,” as they say in the grocery trade.

If I can buy coffee I know I like for sixty-five cents an ounce, I shouldn’t pay more than $7.80 for a 12-ounce bag. Given how grocers price things, $7.99 is the price I’m usually looking for. So any price that is >0 and <$8.00 will usually entice me to buy multiple units of a coffee I know I like. It’s obviously possible to spend much more or much less on coffee than sixty-five cents an ounce. Do either at your own peril, however.

Finally, having worked through this exercise, I realize that I know longer have a dilemma. I know what I like, how much I need, and what I’m comfortable paying for it. I shall now apply these same principles to our health care dilemma. Don’t hold your breath.

Instant Coffee, Starbucks Style

I was surprised and delighted to receive a 2-pack of Starbucks VIA Ready Brew in the mail yesterday. I've been eager to try it, as I've heard from friends and former co-workers that it's quite good.

Instant coffee has never been anything like a regular part of my personal beverage portfolio. I can remember my dad making really instant coffee--his preferred method was to dissolve the powder in tap water then heat the mixture in the microwave oven, presumably to a ready-to-drink temperature, not wanting to be bothered to actually heat the water. Adults do strange things.

A trip to India to visit tea gardens provided another instant memory, as well as providing insight into the mind of the coffee drinker. Our guide for part of the trip, a very charming veteran of the tea business, was a coffee drinker. So even when we were staying in the house at the tea garden itself, where the fragrance of freshly fermented and delicious tea hung in the air, he demanded coffee each morning. It was clear from where the jar of crystals was kept, how long it took the host to find it and the condition of the jar that he was the only coffee drinker around, and that he had likely been served from that same jar for several years. We asked him how he could pass up such delicious tea in favor of clearly lousy coffee, he said simply, "I am a coffee drinker."

So instant coffee isn't something I've ever drunk --I've tasted it over the years, mostly in the context of work. I was not much of a coffee drinker before discovering specialty coffee in the mid-80s, shortly before I began working for Starbucks. So to me, the typical instant coffee simply isn't coffee. It may be warm, brown and occasionally drinkable, but it fundamentally doesn't taste like coffee. Its aroma is more like sweet cooked grain of some sort than it is like coffee. The flavor is vaguely sweet and toasty, but not what I think of as coffee.

The idea of a truly good-tasting instant coffee is certainly intriguing, and I never had any philosophical opposition to it. I was aware of and vaguely on the periphery of some of the early work done on instant coffee at Starbucks. The full flavor and high quality of every coffee in the Starbucks lineup created an enormous challenge, especially if matching the taste of fresh-brewed was the goal.

I'm not privy to what I would call the "sausage-making" aspect of the birth of VIA, and could not write about it if I was. So my reactions to what I received in the mail yesterday simply reflect my views as a guy who loves coffee and is more educated about coffee than the average consumer. (I honestly don't now how soluble coffee is made well enough to describe the process in a way that would be illuminating.)

OK, to start with, I was struck by the fact that the most eye-grabbing element on the mailer is the word INSTANT--all caps, bigger font than anything else. There is also a small Starbucks logo and a slightly larger "Starbucks VIA Ready Brew" identifier--since it's just plain text, I won't use the word "logo." The ingredients of the product are soluble coffee and microground coffee.

So...how did it taste? The packet contained one "stick" each of Italian Roast and Colombia. I tried the Italian Roast first because everyone I've spoken to both inside and outside Starbucks told me this was the better of the two offerings.

The first thing I noticed was the aroma, which was very pleasant, thanks to the presence of the microground coffee, an addition to the product that no doubt adds cost but makes it look and smell more like coffee. That great aroma disappeared pretty much immediately when I added the hot water; it was replaced with the smell that to me is instantly recognizable as soluble coffee. It was augmented by the smell of the microground coffee mixed with the hot water...which is NOT the same smell as the in-the-cup smell of freshly brewed coffee. Flavor-wise, I was surprised by the sharp/bitter taste of the coffee, and as it cooled, by the presence of some acidity in the cup. Both of these may sound bad, but they are very unusual in an instant coffee product. The bottom line for me: way above average for instant coffee, but not a match or substitute for fresh-brewed.

The Colombia smelled worse but in some ways tasted better. It was not the Starbucks Colombia I have known over the years, by any stretch. But because it's not a dark roast like the Italian (at least I assume that's what accounts for the difference), there is in some ways a fuller range of coffee flavor in the Colombia. It's clearly more lively and acidic than the Italian, so in that sense it's a more "complete" cup. However...it's not the cup for me. As impressive as it is to have this much coffee flavor in a soluble product, it doesn't hit the mark for me as a) fresh-brewed or b) the taste of Starbucks I know and love.

Even so, these are the best-tasting instant coffees I've ever had.

This post is already close to the length at which an apology is normally made. So I'll save thoughts on when I might use VIA, the value proposition and other observations for another time.

The Big Five-0

Today is my 50th birthday. It's kind of shocking, really. I remember when I was maybe ten or twelve years old chatting with friends about the year 2000. We all reasonably assumed we'd be alive to see it, but that we'd be quite aged--most of us turned 41 that year. Fifty was simply beyond our comprehension.

I tend to compare myself each year with how I remember my parents at the same age. One thing that makes that difficult is that my folks, like many in their generation, had kids earlier than we did. So when my day was 50, I was 25. My girls are 15 and 14--growing up for sure, but still kids in most ways. This is one reason being 50 feels really different than I thought it would.

So having kids who are still kids keeps me feeling young, and having worked around so many people younger than I am does too. So there is not a lot of anxiety about being 50. And one great thing about "middle age" is that I can legitimately claim to have learned some things about life AND I'm still young enough to make changes and act on the things I've learned. That's a real blessing.

Nothing Stays the Same

A harrowing experience with a rented power tool inspired me to start a blog. Being laid off 12 days ago revived my interest in blogging and also freed up quite a few hours in my day. So I'm going to attempt to chronicle the job hunt process here, as well as pass on other bits of information and insight that interest me.

Here's my starting point: Anyone out there have any pointers for me? Or any jobs?

Concrete Plans

We've found someone to build the concrete steps in the front yard. This is a real sign of progress, as it will help give some shape and substance to what we're doing. We also have someone doing a bit of design work for us, so things are really moving.

The concrete work was supposed to start this past Wednesday, but Stacy got a call from the guy on Sunday. He was out elk hunting and was not planning to be back working if he didn't have an elk. The season ends tomorrow, so he'll be back in town and will hopefully start on Monday. Stacy was gracious about it, going so far as to say that while she normally comes down squarely on the side of the animals in the whole hunting equation, she would be rooting for him.

In the meantime, we've once again used a gasoline-powered tool in the yard. I'm happy to report that the roto-tiller is far superior machine to the sod cutter.

Several Things

I am surprised by how long it's been since my last post. We've been pretty busy, what with the Olympics, political conventions, school starting and of course, yard work. So in no particular order, here are a few comments on recent goings-on:

1. If the milkman is here, it must be Wednesday. I've always been pretty time-and-date conscious; I think I started wearing a watch in about second grade. (Today I have no idea where my watch is.) The work week has certain patterns and markers such that I pretty much always know what day it is. But a couple weeks ago, I spent a good five minutes sitting in the living room trying to figure out what day it was. I'm sure it was during the Olympics, when it was never quite clear what day it was--between China being 15 hours ahead of us and watching events live on Canadian TV and then seeing them rehashed and repeated seemingly a couple days later on NBC -- it got confusing at times. But once I realized the milkman had come that day, I finally knew for certain it was Wednesday.
2. Appliance Day. We took the plunge and bought some new appliances from my favorite purveyor, Albert Lee Appliance here in Seattle. We've replaced our fridge and washer/dryer, all of which are 10-14 years old. We got one of those cool front-loading, money-saving washers and a much better dryer than we had before. We bought a dishwasher too, but need to have some plumbing done before it can be installed. And we had to get an electrician out to change the outlet from a range outlet to a dryer outlet. We weren't aware of this condition and don't know what its implications are in terms of drying speed, but a load of clothes that formerly took over 2 hours to dry now dries in 34 minutes. (It is also the case that the new high efficiency washers like the one we bought remove more water during the spin cycle, so they go into the dryer considerably less wet than with the old technology.)
3. Retro-appliance acquisition. Stacy's sister visited from Arizona, and delivered a juicer that Stacy's mom is no longer using. It's an Acme (really!) Juicerator 5001. Not sure how old the actual machine is, but the manual that came with it has a 1962 copyright date. The manual is hilarious and worthy of a whole separate post at some point. Anyway, aside from some frequent problems with extreme vibration, I'm really enjoying making carrot-apple juice blends.
4. Food find. We went to Home Depot today (the one on Aurora around 120th Street in the north part of Seattle.) Bought some plants and a rake, and as we were leaving we noticed a "taco trailer" and decided to try it. It's nestled in among some nice old trees in the north end of the parking lot, and has a nice little seating area and great music. The food is prepared inside a rather slick looking black trailer. It's called "El Camion" ("the truck") and the food was very tasty. I had a pork tamale, which featured a very smooth, silky layer of masa surrounding a spicy pork mixture. Also a small soft taco with carne asada. We also tried a quesadilla. All were excellent, and it appears to be very popular with many of the Hispanic workers in the area--always a good sign.
5. Sarah Palin. I have to say something, or a few somethings. First: how do you run against a skit? McCain and Palin appear to be basing their wacky act on Dana Carvey's grumpy old man and Church Lady skits from Saturday Night Live. Second: nobody knew for sure when McCain selected her whether she was qualified. To me, the very nature of the campaign proves that she is not--she is simply playing a character, based partly on her own "story" but mostly created by the McCain campaign. It's simply not real, and her script is made up almost entirely of lies and insults. The McCain-Palin ticket should not be taken seriously. Third: I don't think Barack Obama is perfect, but for the Republicans to seriously question his experience and qualifications relative to Palin's is absurd. He has endured 19 months of intense scrutiny and won a gruelling battle to secure the nomination. She was the impulsive choice of one desperate man.