Political Experience: What Matters, and Why?

[UGAalum94]

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.