Launching a political career as a small-town mayor creates one of the most interesting resume items a candidate for higher office can have. A small town mayor doesn’t just blabber in the legislature about theoretical soutions to vaguely defined problems but has to actually SOLVE REAL PROBLEMS.
And more than that, they operate in an environment of complete accountability and transparency. Their constitutents know where they live, where their children go to school, their home phone number, etc. It’s far easier for a legislator to hide himself away in a body of 100 other speechifiers than it is for a small-town mayor to duck the public.
In fact, I would argue that the reason you do NOT see many Sarah Palins rise to the top of the political heap from such environs is that most who reach the top would never take the risk of being a mayor, small-town or otherwise, or do so well at the job as to merit a step up to governor and beyond in the first place.
In FACT, I would argue that had Barack Obama taken his empty-rhetoric, barely-in-the-closet Marxist approach to governing a town of 9,000 his career in politics would have stopped dead right there.
Newly created, called "Clear Choices" ......