Is Sarah Palin really a maverick? Does she really have the right experience? Is she really a hands-on governor?

Let’s get real.

From the Los Angeles Times:

Republican state Sen. Fred Dyson, a friend and fellow reformer who praises Palin for taking up the issue, acknowledged that she was not fully engaged in the details of the ethics bill and that some legislators had been rankled by her lack of engagement in other issues as well.

Still, he points out, her popularity in Alaska remains undiminished.

Other legislators say that the governor has been so focused on her own priorities that she has been unwilling to consider other significant matters — including the state’s poor ranking in providing health insurance to children. Alaska ranks near the bottom of the states in making children from lower-middle-income families eligible for a government insurance program.

She used the line-item veto this year to cut funding for $268 million in capital projects from spending bills, including money for a senior citizens center and batting cages for the Ketchikan Little League. At the same time, the Anchorage Daily News reported, she preserved $2 million for an academic conference highlighting arguments that global warming isn’t threatening the survival of polar bears.

A former associate director of the governor’s Washington office, Larry Persily, said that some of the governor’s problems resulted from the fact that she “underestimated exponentially how much more complex state government is than the city of Wasilla.”

Palin is smart but was “never deeply engaged,” he said.

And it doesn’t help that Palin has now– since being selected as John McCain’s right-hand man– she’s “started a legal maneuver to prevent” the legislative inquiry into her actions with her former brother-in-law from going forward. All right for not being a total flip-flop.