The political and media elites have been laughing at Sarah Palin’s “small town” years. But every mayor and council member she meets over the next two months will have a bond with her that no one else on the national tickets can match.

Most commentators have figured out or soon will with the help of Beldar that she really, really knows the energy issue, and to a nation stunned by the sudden shock to their household budgets brought about by 30 years of indifference to new exploration, this will be a huge advantage. But so will be her experience with federal Endangered Species Act, which has been and remains central to my law practice and which interests very few other than those impacted by it.

In many key states --Colorado, New Mexico, Florida, Washington and Oregon to name just five-- the “ESA” has had devastating impacts on many industries and communities. When Sarah Palin led her state into federal court to challenge the absurd listing of the polar bear as a “threatened species” because of predictions about what might happen to the bears if what might happen to polar ice actually did happen, she took a stand that will trigger sustained applause in places and among people who are actually familiar with the workings of this extraordinarily onerous statute. As an avid outdoorswoman and conservationist, she has zero fear of environmental activists jeering about her indifference to nature. Her passion for the great outdoors will reawaken the TR tradition in the GOP and combine it with an experience in federal bureaucratic meddling with state and local governance that will put inside the Beltway a true property rights’ advocate. I haven’t seen reference yet to any specific experience witht Clean Water Act, NEPA or the Clean Air Act, but her familiarity with the federal hidden hand –the BLM, the USFWS, the ACOE—will be extremely useful as she campaigns across the country in communities hard hit by the expansion of federal regulation far beyond its intended and many believe constitutional limits.

The pro-life and pro-Second Amendment communities were immediately taken with Sarah Palin’s record. But there are other constituencies out there which will love what they learn about the Alaska governor.

The political pros all agree that votes for presidents usually turn on the question of which candidate is perceived to understand and value what that voter has experienced and feels. Reactions to the veeps typically do not enter into that calculation.

Sarah Palin may be different. To moms struggling to raise internet and text-messaging teens, to the parents of special needs children, to regular church goers, hunters and snowmobilers, Sarah Palin is already a friend.

She will soon be a friend to every land-owner bedeviled by complicated federal statutes wielded by remote and uncaring federal officials, and to the local elected officials across the country who appreciate exactly what it is that she did for that decade on the Wasilla city council.