From George Will: How important is "experience" for a presidential candidate?

[*anj*]

My dh forwarded this to me. I thought it was interesting on a historical level. I am not posting this to argue the merits of either Clinton or Obama. I am posting it because I think that Will has made a good point, and because in my ignorance I didn't know that Buchanan had had such a resume.

 

(Here's the link for the full article as published by the Washington Post: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/20/AR2008022002268.html?hpid=opinionsbox1)

 

Nothing, however, will assuage Clinton supporters' sense of injustice if the upstart Obama supplants her. Their, and her, sense of entitlement is encapsulated in her constant invocations of her "35 years" of "experience." Well.

She is 60. She left Yale Law School at age 25. Evidently she considers everything she has done since school, from her years at Little Rock's Rose law firm to her good fortune with cattle futures, as presidentially relevant experience.

The president who came to office with the most glittering array of experiences had served 10 years in the House of Representatives, then became minister to Russia, then served 10 years in the Senate, then four years as secretary of state (during a war that enlarged the nation by 33 percent), then was minister to Britain. Then, in 1856, James Buchanan was elected president and in just one term secured a strong claim to the rank as America's worst president. Abraham Lincoln, the inexperienced former one-term congressman, had an easy act to follow.

 

 

[mcconnellboys]

I'm actually not for any of the candidates currently in the running, but I would submit for your consideration that we have a lot more to think about today regarding foreign policy than we did during the time of the two presidents mentioned. We have a much larger US population than we did then and a greatly complicated infrastructure, healthcare structure, and the list goes on and on.....

 

I truly believe that someone (anyone) with a proven record of good, sound managerial experience under their belts (and experience from a variety of situations would be even better) would be the better choice for president for us at this time in history, for a plethora of reasons.

 

I like Obama's style, too. I like his enthusiasm. I like his charisma. I would like all of him a lot better with a couple of decades of proven managerial experience of ANY kind under his belt. At this time in history, I think his appointment to office will result in his being perhaps merely a puppet of the Kennedy family... and that's a shame, because I really DO think that he has great potential, if he doesn't get used by others....

 

We are in a place in the world arena today in which I don't think we can afford too many more mistakes... so electing someone with so little business experience to conduct the biggest business in the world really does cause me some concern......

 

Regena

[mcconnellboys]

And for whoever told me to "move away from the am dial and get informed", LOL, I don't listen to talk radio or any pundit shows for that matter. Is that what they're saying, too? If so, oh well, I guess great conservative minds must think alike...... I based that comment on the push I'm seeing from Sen. Kennedy. He's never gonna be president, but I think he'd like to make one in his own image......

 

Regena

[Doran]

...will result in his being perhaps merely a puppet...and that's a shame, because I really DO think that he has great potential, if he doesn't get used by others....

 

 

 

This question has the great likelihood of sounding either snarky or utterly ignorant. Neither would be exactly true, so here goes. Don't you think that all, or certainly most, of our modern presidents have been puppets under the control of their biggest financial backers?

 

I leave it at that.

 

Doran

[mcconnellboys]

I'm not very good at expressing myself. Let me try again, please. Yes, I absolutely do think that abuse of presidential power has occurred to a greater or lesser extent with most ALL of our former presidents (certainly NOT just those during the 20th century!) In fact, I've been shocked in studying the early modern era to see just how far back this sort of corruption goes. But until we can change more about our way of life here in the U.S. than just our political system, I don't think that sad fact is going to go away. And I haven't seen Communist or Fascist societies really do any better job of controlling this sort of abuse of power, either. So my best case scenario given the system we have, I suppose (which I do believe to be the best system of government on earth), is someone experienced enough and strong enough to know their own mind and follow it, at least to a greater than lesser extent -rather than just being led around by the nose, which I think might tend to be the case with a younger and less experienced candidate....

 

As I said in my original post on this, my choice right now is "none of the above" regarding those in the running, so I'm not trying to espouse a viewpoint in favor of any Republican nor any Democratic candidate. Nor to denigrate any of them. I've also said in past regarding Obama that I do like his style, but find his substance lacking at this time in his life. With more experience, I might feel completely differently about him. Lack of experience on the part of anyone frightens me. I did not say that I think Mrs. Clinton is experienced either. On the contrary, if I look at her record, I don't feel comfortable with her level of managerial experience either..... Didn't say I like McCain's level of managerial experience, either......

 

The point I was originally trying to make about Will's comments is that I really don't think they hold up on closer consideration. I think he merely should have pointed out that Mrs. Clinton may be whining about having more experience, but the record shows that she doesn't really have any more solid qualifications than Obama. He then could have laid out a checklist of the two candidates side by side for purposes of comparison. Instead, he chose to make a rather dramatic and overly romantic statement that I feel is hollow.

 

Here's what he said:

 

"The president who came to office with the most glittering array of experiences had served 10 years in the House of Representatives, then became minister to Russia, then served 10 years in the Senate, then four years as secretary of state (during a war that enlarged the nation by 33 percent), then was minister to Britain. Then, in 1856, James Buchanan was elected president and in just one term secured a strong claim to the rank as America's worst president. Abraham Lincoln, the inexperienced former one-term congressman, had an easy act to follow." (italics and bold, mine)

 

This implies that Buchanan had been a much loved figure during his long career and then ruined his reputation in the white house. I don't see any such thing when I read about Buchanan. He had turned down a position on the supreme court prior to being asked to run for president, but I don't see that he had any strong following of groupies trailing him around in life. He stated in his inaugural address that he would not run for president again under any circumstances. He had the misfortune to be president during the time of the lead-up to secession and civil war in the United States. Chances are he was going to make someone unhappy.

 

Did Lincoln do better on that score? I think not. The country exploded into war hardly before he could take office. And folks were still unhappy enough with him at the end of the war to assassinate him. Yes, he is loved in retrospect, NOW, for what he did for this country, but do you think he would have garnered such a strong ranking during the years of reconstruction?

 

Scholars tally up the scores of what presidents did and did not do in office and rank Buchanan in the bottom 2 or 3 presidents, in part, because he maintained a persistent immobility with regard to doing something, anything, to try to prevent the civil war from happening. He was a lawyer and stated his opinion that secession was illegal. He also believed that going to war to prevent secession was illegal. Was he wrong about that? When Lincoln DID go to war to try to prevent secession, he was criticized for that act, too.

 

And Lincoln was not without his critics regarding his handling of the rest of the war, either. Nor was he free from pandering to special interest groups. Did the emancipation proclamation free the slaves of states that did not seceed from the Union? After the war, Lincoln wanted to send all blacks back to Africa, and Liberia was set up as a place to receive them, with many attempts being made in the years following the civil war to relocate as many as possible back there, especially those who were educated and held trades (and who were thus a threat/competition to the business interests of whites).

 

The favor of presidents rises and falls to the whims of public perception, nostalgia, political climate in different ages, human rights issues of the age, etc. Theodore Roosevelt is also considered to be one of our most beloved presidents, NOW, but because public perception was geared toward isolationism at a time when he was trying to get us to ramp up for world war, he was not able to win his re-election bid in spite of all he'd done for this country (and the world). I don't think folks of that era would have placed him in the big 10 of U.S. presidents. But Ron Paul sure would have had a shot at election that year!

 

Some presidents have found themselves hated simply because of circumstances occurring in the world at the time of their presidency that were completely beyond their control. To suggest that some undefined "scholarly perspective" on presidents, ranking them as "good or bad", and Will's trying to insinuate that someone experienced who receives a "bad" ranking vs. someone "inexperienced" who receives a "good" ranking, might correlate, or be a good measure to use in the current presidential election, just doesn't make sense to me.

 

I've tried to state more clearly why I didn't buy Will's comments, but I don't know if I've succeeded any better. As I said earlier today, I don't like to listen to political pundits nor to read their fluff. They have a very bad habit of making statements that sound good on the surface, but have no substance when you start to give them more consideration. Isn't that some form of logical fallacy? Where are all our logic-minded folks?

 

Regena