Political Experience: What Matters, and Why?
 

Clearly, this election cycle has been dominated by a few issues - the war, the economy, gas prices, etc. However, it's also been dominated by an issue that is more ethereal or broad - the topic of experience.

The McCain camp has decried Obama's resume as light and lacking - he has a few years as junior Senator and some state legislature experience that holds varying amounts of water, depending on your view. One reason for bringing Biden along as VP is to "bolster" perhaps, with a Congressional record rivaling McCain's.

The Obama camp has fired back at Sarah Palin's relatively lack of experience, as well - just under two years as Governor of a small and unique state, and only municipal experience prior to that. Some feel this puts a tarnish to McCain's lengthy resume.

With that background - what, exactly, do you look for in terms of experience for the President? Why are certain forms of experience more important than others?

More importantly, I guess - what exact parts of the job of President of the USA do you think rely upon or require the most experience?

(Try to keep this clean - argue your point, but disparaging comments that are off-topic will result in me punching your mom. You are forewarned. Be a freaking adult.)

I don't know that experience is as important as knowledge. I mean, experience can be a negative (i.e. if you had experience in the UN and you were such a prick that all the other nations hated you). I would rather have someone with little experience who is willing to learn - even as POTUS.

Sorry, I don't mean to derail, I just wanted to throw that out there.

I don't tend to look at experience when looking at a Presidential candidate. For me, the most important things are the candidate's platform, their stances on the issues, and whether I think they can surround themselves with intelligent people.

I don't think there's ANY experience that can adequately prepare you to be President. Some longtime Congressman/women would be terrible Presidents, and some people who only have a few years of experience could be excellent leaders.

Additionally, I think you get into splitting hairs when talking about experience. Does the experience of a Governor, who has been the head of a state, outweigh that of a Congressperson? Does national experience trump state/local experience? Although some knowledge of how the game is played in Washington can be helpful, I think having smart people around you can even the playing field, so to speak, and can be even more crucial.

Personally, I would like to see someone with non-political experience in something like running a university, a hospital or a major charitable organization like the Red Cross, successfully of course. I agree that political experience can have negative connotations attached.

When chosing a candidate I first look at their stand on issues and if they are a strong enough personality to ask for help from knowledgable advisors

I would tend to agree, and would only add one other thing important to me: whether the candidate has demonstrated good judgment. I don't discount experience, but these other things -- position on the issues, judgment and picking (and listening to) the right people in the right positions -- can outweigh lack of experience. In some ways, the main value of experience is that it gives a view to measure some of these other things.

Also, frankly, I value a candidate's ability to communicate well. I don't mean necessarily to be eloquent, but simply to communicate well. I wonder, for example, if the American people would have rallied quite like they did during WWII had it not been for FDR's ability to communicate with the American people. It was certainly one of Reagan's gifts, and it had an effect on his ability to get things done (and to reshape the GOP). There are times the president needs to inspire or cheerlead.

That's one thing I forgot, but is definitely important. A President holds a lot of power in the words he/she speaks, so having the ability to communicate well is extremely important.

Let's make a list of past POTUS'es since the end of WWII and how much prior experience they had before the job and how thier presidential ratings were when they left office.

I think that approach may be slightly flawed:
1) What counts as "experience?" Are you talking state or national?

2) Presidential ratings are hopelessly inaccurate, and it's widely accepted by the academic community that it takes a number of years to properly assess a President's impact. For example, I think Truman had terrible ratings when he left office, and he's considered one of the top 10 Presidents.

So you want to make a subjective list of attributes (because you'll have to make arbitrary decisions on how to "combine" experience - all governors together? All congressmen? What about people who did both? What about 1940 versus 1840?) and then look for correlation with a temporal poll that serves as a singular and poor stand-in for performance?

Not to mention the sample-size issues, since we haven't exactly had approval ratings dating back to the XYZ Affair.

My point was that we can't "prove" that one set of experiential attributes is best - it would be impossible. Instead, I want to know what's important to us individually - what you think is best, since you can't "know" for certain.

Can you all separate the two? Experience vs. knowledge--doesn't one lead into the other?

I think there is an issue of "leadership" that comes into question. If elected (or selected depending on where you sit), the persons will be our leaders.

We currently have a leader who had plenty of leadership experiences including his own VP. But they still ran our country into the ground. Our troops fight with little gear doing the best they can do and come back home to what? A job doing what? Health support services doing what?

We had an economic surplus 10 years ago, now, we have a gajillion dollar deficit. So no matter whose platform any of us support, regardless of what we think, these will have to be cleaned up before we go full throttle into any other country exacting our military might...

There will always be poverty, suffering is the human condition, and war is not the answer to it. But as human beings apart of this planet--this Global Economy--we have to play in this pool and try to make something better of it.

So, for me I am looking for revelation and revisionist thoughts. Something that can help may children's grandchildren... (Not that I have any...)

It's a really interesting question. We seem to want an impossibility: someone with extensive government experience who is still somehow an outsider and in touch with the common person.

Along with the good judgment thing, I think assessments of overall character play in. I know that opens the door to a lot of personal life crap, but I have known very few people who were completely crappy in their personal lives and yet exemplary professionally.

I'm not saying that I'm looking for someone without sin because I certainly don't expect that, but I think the kinds of mistakes that people make and their reaction to them are revealing and may be kind of predictive of the leadership you can expect. Charismatic and charming but not particularly faithful got us one kind of leadership; reformed ne'er do well after religious conversion got us another.

Certainly every person is unique, so I don't mean you could expect that based on a certain type of mistake in the past you could expect a certain type of leadership, but the patterns of a person's life do reveal something worth knowing about how they are likely to handle things in the future.

And maybe oddly, past successes could reveal traits that would harm a person's effectiveness in office because the demands of one job are different than the demands of another. Someone who in congress was devoted to building consensus and compromise might actually struggle with the sort of singular leadership of the executive. (I realize that the pres. has to work with congress, so I don't mean that consensus building could in itself be a bad thing, just that it's a different job.)

But in terms of kind of resume-based government experience, I want to see enough evidence, preferably in terms of a voting or veto record to be able to determine what a person might do or what agenda he or she might advance. I'm not particular about whether it's at the state or national level.

I think Captain of the Basketball team experience is absolutely essential b/c I think it's the captains who call the plays, so in the grown up world, they can call plays in DC. :o

-Someone of great character who can fully represent the US to the world

-Someone of fair judgement. I try to figure out a candidate's definition of fair. I am not going to find a candidate who aligns perfectly with my beliefs, and as it stands now, both POTUS candidates have a little bit of this and a little bit of that. So, figuring out if they are going to be fair or bias, or what they think of as normal protocol is to lean towards strictly their side of the political area or if they are willing to be the president of all of us.

-Someone who won't be a Veto whore.

I don't think you got the memo:

For this election, I'm just looking for someone-- ANYONE who doesn't have their head up their ass.

That is why, right now, I still don't know who I am voting for. :o

KSig and Ksig kid....

Both of you brought up very good points which in that case...the broad word of 'experience' alone without a clear and agreeable definition of what that is, good or bad, qualitive vs quantitive and whose judgement it is of what weighs the most in making 'experience' counts, renders discussing this subject, moot.

I don't see why it renders the discussion moot. It was a general question, asking for personal opinions on the subject; I don't think it was meant to start some debate on whether one type of experience matters more than another.

" without a clear and agreeable definition "

I think it does, is saying that we need to have a few guidelines in place...and to a degree, I agree...what qualities are we looking for that would have rendered past POTUS'es more or less experienced than others?

I mean starting with both Clinton and Bush, there are various degrees of their experience we could debate over and their final out come upon leaving office.

Basically as you said, it would be difficult to even have a general discussion without more detail....

So...would you like to think of some ideas?

and actually looking back on it, the title more or less does ask the very question...what do we consider 'experience'?

Political experience is important only in that it is the only way we, the voting public can look at a candidate and begin to guess what kind of a President that person will be. I don't think there is anything which can prepare someone to be the President of the United States except perhaps some sort of service in a high-level executive job which deals extensively with both foreign and domestic issues. In that vein, none of the candidates really have any experience.

When I look at McCain, for example, I have 35 years worth of a track record. I see a man who generally votes with the right-wing of the party, but is not afraid to occasionally break with the party to pursue his own agenda, McCain-Feingold, for example -- something most Republicans were strongly against. He also co-sponsored the much-dreaded 'comprehensive' immigration reform bill last year.

Unfortunately, McCain of 2007 doesn't look a lot like McCain of 2008. He hasn't to my knowledge repudiated McCain-Feingold, but, according to Media Matters, http://mediamatters.org/items/200808130004 he has since repudiated his former co-sponsoring of the immigration bill. I think this dash to the right wing of the party is a mistake which makes McCain look disingenuous.

I think what attracts me to McCain more than anything else (yes, I'm a cynic) is the fact that he's a Republican and that for the foreseeable future, both houses will be Democrat-controlled. 4 more years of gridlock is preferable to me when I think the wrong kind of change is the only other option (I say that in reference to the policies Obama would have a decent chance of getting passed, if elected).

On the other side of the ballot, we have Obama. I don't think the lack of experience is a terribly troubling item, and I think he's perfectly capable of doing the job and dealing with foreign leaders. I think he may have said a few naive things along the campaign trail re: foreign policy, but either President will have a bevy of national policy advisors to help him along, so this isn't a huge concern to me.

The most strikingly positive thing about Obama is that he is at the head of what looks to be one of the most well-run campaigns in our nation's history. Even if his message is crafted by the best in the political game, Obama can deliver it like no other. He's achieved this 'celebrity' status because of his ability to connect with people and be charismatic. By being part of such a well-oiled machine, Obama has shown that he either is an amazing leader, or has employed some amazing leaders to run this machine of his. I think that running the executive branch successfully takes many of the same qualities as running a good campaign, so I have no worries about his ability to step into the job on day one and be successful.

That said, I am not a fan of his stances on foreign policy, his tax code, his social security policies, his health care policies, or just about anything. My problem with Obama has nothing to do with the man and everything to do with his politics. I do, for what it's worth, think he's far and away the more genuine of the two candidates in that he probably believes what his writers are putting in his speeches. The new McCain is far and away, IMHO, more of the "empty-suit" between the two candidates.

The empty suit doesn't scare me as much as the liberal wing of the court having a solid majority though. There's a good chance that at least one conservative justice won't live another 4 years (an even better chance one doesn't make it 8 years) or that Kennedy retires. I prefer legislative gridlock, and perhaps a solid conservative majority on the court to any real 'change' proposed by either candidate.

Not to get too off topic, but I think it is more likely that Stevens, Ginsburg and Souter leave than Scalia (especially if Obama wins the election - I've read that Ginsburg would leave during the next Democratic term, and that Souter is eyeing retirement). The wild card would be Kennedy, but I could see him as being someone who would stay on the Court until they had to wheel him out.

I see (and respect) your point, but I can't agree with it. If judgment and character matter to me, I'm not voting for an "empty suit," which to me indicates choosing political expediency over character and the courage of one's convictions.

I think you're right. I don't see Roberts, Thomas or Alito -- all age 60 or younger -- going anywhere anytime soon. Meanwhile, Stevens is 88 and Ginsburg, whose health has not been good, is 75. Scalia and Kennedy are both 72, but provided his health holds out (and I know of nothing at this point to suggest it won't), I don't see Scalia retiring anytime soon, and probably not Kennedy either. Breyer (70) I don't know.

I think it's likely to be at least 2 or 3 more presidential terms before there is any real chance of the balance of the court shifting.

I read somewhere that Ginsburg will not retire during a Republican administration. She's still an extremely sharp questioner from the bench, so I could see her staying through the next administration (although I still think Scalia will stick around longer than her).

Part of me thinks Stevens will stick around to break Douglas' record on the bench; he too is still quite active during oral arguments, and his opinions are still sharp (no matter what you think of their outcomes), so hopefully he'll have a better end of the bench than Douglas or some of the other long-timers.

Like I said, judgment and character aren't the most important things to me and even if I was to stipulate that Obama had judgment and character in spades, I still wouldn't vote for him based upon the direction he'd take this country and the sort of folks he'd put on the bench.

With respect to the ages of the 4 typically liberal justices on the Court, I never even considered them as I'm not so worried about them being replaced by someone who would tend to vote the same way as I'm worried about one of the 4 conservatives (no, I don't think Kennedy is classifiable as anything) being replaced by someone who would give the liberals a solid 5/6 vote majority. Scalia is 72, as you said, so another 4/8 years might be iffy for him, and none of the justices are really young. Anything can happen, and that concerns me.

There is a clear and agreeable definition of "experience" - it's the application that we disagree upon, and that application can certainly be discussed among reasonable people because it is entirely personal.

There is no "right or wrong" or "good or bad" in this sense. If that invalidates discussion, then it invalidates all discussion over anything that is not quantitative, and discussion over quantitative items should actually be moot (since, presumably, the data will speak for themselves).

I would imagine Scalia has a similar plan as Ginsburg, in that he's not going to leave the bench unless he believes that his replacement will be someone who subscribes to the same school of thought. Thomas, Alito and Roberts are fairly young, and I don't think any of them have any serious health problems (beyond Roberts' health concerns).

If Obama and Biden are elected, I think their first SCOTUS pick could be VERY interesting. Biden was one of the leaders of the charge against Bork, so I could see the Republicans putting up a big fight for just that reason.