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: