There's a great site called the Great Circle Mapper where you put in two locations and it tells you the distance from one to the other (using airport codes). Since Sarah Palin has foreign policy experience because Alaska is close to Russia, I'd decide to go ahead and see what kind of accolades I could heap on myself.
And we'll find out a bit about this part of [scary, scary, help PUTIN!!] Russia Sarah with which has so much experience.
So how far is Wasilla from the nearest part of Russia? Well, first you have to find somewhere in eastern Siberia with an airport. The nearest region of Russia is the Chukotka Autonomous Okrug. What? You say you've never heard of it? It's only 284,000 square miles, or about the size of Texas. That's a lot of land. Of course, since most of it is way above the Arctic Circle, and it's a gajillion miles from anything, it is home to 53,000 people, the size of, well, of five or six Wasillas. Or, a fraction of the size of Barack's Illinois Senate District. That's less than 1 person for every five square miles, or more than five times more sparse than Alaska. No offense to the great people of the Chukotka Autonomous Okrug, but that sounds like an arctic wasteland.
Anyway, there are a couple airports in Chukotka, one of which is at Provideniya Bay. It's not much of an airport, with a gravel runway (although it is longer than the airport in Wasilla), but it will do for our distance purposes. So how far is it from Wasilla? GCM says: 767 miles.
Okay, that's not really all that close. That's a tad bit longer than the distance from New York to Chicago. And that's across the Bering Sea, on of the less hospitable areas in the world. But, wait, isn't Alaska's capital in Juneau? Maybe Juneau's closer — and that's where, as governor, Palin would have gotten all her foreign policy experience. Uh, oh, Juneau's more than 1300 miles from Russia. That's a lot further than those latte sippers in Seattle (909 miles) and barely further than those San Francisco liberals in, well, San Francisco (1535 miles).
So, now, I live in the Twin Cities. (And yes we are very glad the Republicans have gone far, far away.) Great Circle Mapper has another great feature that lets you put in a distance and shows you what is within a certain distance, say, 767 miles, of it. (We have to convert to nautical miles to use it, 767 statute miles = 667 nautical miles. I found that out on the google.) Put in MSP and I find out that I am an expert in foreign policy, too, as within 767 miles of my house is James Bay, all the way across Canada. I must be an expert in agriculture, too, as this distance stretches across the heartland, from New York to Montana. Heck, I'm within 767 miles of Norman, Oklahoma, Buffalo, New York, Billings, Montana and Moosonee, Ontario (on James Bay).
So, in addition to agriculture (heck, I should be Secretary of Agriculture at this rate), I'm an expert in most of the Big 12, most of the Rust Belt (Buffalo, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Toledo, Detroit…), and probably polar bears, just like Sarah Palin, who doesn't believe in science, and some astute letter writers who, uh, do.
But I live up here in the Frozen North. Imagine if I lived in, say, Sacramento. If I lived in Sacramento, I'd be an expert in all of NAFTA, being within 767 miles of both Canada and Mexico. Heck, Ahnold is from a foreign country and speaks a different language, he must be super smart about international relations.
Who else? Well folks in Atlanta are probably Hurricane experts, since they are within 767 miles of most of the Gulf. Foreign policy, too, being with in shouting distance of Cuba and Canada.
So, yeah, Palin's proximity is relevant. As relevant as Charlotte, North Carolina is to folks in Burlington, Vermont.