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Are You Experienced?
The last thing I want to do is idealize state legislatures. Their members, most of whom have private jobs, are prone to conflicts of interest worse than those that occur in Washington. They are frequently easy for lobbyists to manipulate. And on the whole, I think it is fair to say, the ones who remain at their desks term after term may not be quite as bright as the ones who make it further up the ladder to Congress. But for a smart, curious and hard-working young legislator—for a Barack Obama in the Illinois Senate-can we be so sure that the skill set picked up over eight years in a state Capitol is inferior as presidential preparation to two decades in the pompous, cordoned-off environment of the U.S. Senate? I seriously doubt it.
Assertions about experience were misleading when they were employed in the Democratic primaries by Hillary Clinton. She had been a legislator—a U.S. Senator—for eight years. Obama had been one, albeit at a different level of government for a time—for 12 years. The only way her claim of superior preparation could be taken seriously was to consider her two terms as First Lady to be relevant professional training. That may be true, but it is a claim no one else has ever promulgated in the history of American politics. Does having been First Lady make you better prepared to give the right answer when the phone rings in the dead of night? Maybe it does. I'm not saying no; I'm saying I don't know, and nobody else does either.
As for the fall campaign, I am not urging anyone to vote for Obama, or against McCain, on the issue of experience. What I am suggesting is that experience itself is a slippery commodity to measure—that there is no easy way to guess what sort of political career is ideal for a president—and that we would all be better off just listening to what the candidates say and how they say it, and spending a little time looking into what sort of people they are.
Alan Ehrenhalt is executive editor of Governing magazine and author of "The United States of Ambition" and "The Lost City."
© 2008
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Member Comments
Posted By: Donmeaker @ 07/08/2008 10:19:30 PM
Comment: I will vote for McCain and not Obama because raising taxes on the high income (distinguishable from the wealthy) will reduce the work that these high productivity people do. People who are wealthy don't have to work. Their money works for them. People who have high earned income are doing something that is highly valued, and doing enough of it to make their high salaries.
If you take all of the salary of someone after they make 200,000 dollars a year, who would bother to make a single dollar after that. If you take most of it, they have less incentive to leave their family, or leave the golf course. If you subtract the product of their productive effort from the national economy, we are all poorer. Raising taxes leads to economic slowdown, which hurts the poorest first.
2. Socialized Medicine would reduce medical care to the state of Canada, where their chief product is waiting lists. Canadians who don't want to die while on a waiting list, who are not members of parliment, come to the United States for treatment. I am not a politican, but am aging, and will need to continue to work to raise my two adopted children. I need affordable and temporally responsive medical care to continue to work.
3. Senator Obama and Senator McCain are both wrong on the issue of illegal immigration. They are both for it, for some odd reason. Blacks suffer high unemployment while illegal aliens take most entry level jobs, but hold them for long periods of time, blocking entry into the work force for many young, and most blacks.
4. Senator Obama has shown himself to be completely unserious in foreigh affairs. Providing legimacy to the so called president of Iran, or the Venezualan thug Chavez, would be a colossal error. Obama would sell our our friends in Iraq, and provide aid and comfort to our enemies. Once upon a time that was called treason, and so it still is in the US constitution. McCain would continue to win the war against terror by killing thousands of the most violent muslims, convincing the less radical that the violent path is untenable, and confirm to the more liberal muslims that the path to holiness is gained by prayer, pilgrimage, and charity, rather than through threats, perversion, lies, and murder,
Posted By: Donmeaker @ 07/08/2008 9:56:37 PM
Comment: That Barrak Obama spent unusually long as a state legislator before moving up would indicate that despite his splendid opportunities for education, he is what used to be called "a slow learner".
Posted By: the-commish @ 07/03/2008 9:13:48 PM
Comment: Two words:
Abraham Lincoln!
I rest my case.