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Does experience matter in voter decision-making on presidential choice? It doesn't seem to be the biggest deal at the moment, with all the rage over Barack Obama.
Time 's cover story this week asks: "Does Experience Matter in a President?"
A story is often told at times like this — times when American voters are choosing among candidates richly seasoned with political experience and those who are less experienced but perhaps more exciting alternatives. Once upon a time, the torch was passed to a new generation of Americans, and a charismatic young President, gifted as a speechmaker but little tested as an executive, was finding his way through his first 100 days. On Day 85, he stumbled, and the result for John F. Kennedy was the disastrous Bay of Pigs.
For scholars of the presidency, Kennedy's failure to scuttle or fix the ill-conceived invasion of Cuba is a classic case of the insufficiency of charisma alone. No quips, grins or flights of rhetoric would do. Kennedy needed on-the-job training, as he later admitted to a friend: "Presumably, I was going to learn these lessons sometime, and maybe better sooner than later." Unfortunately, when a President gets an education, we all pay the tuition.
Barack Obama basks in comparisons to J.F.K., but this is one he'd rather avoid. In the run-up to what could be the decisive contests for the Democratic nomination, Obama's relatively light political résumé — eight years as an Illinois legislator and three years in the U.S. Senate — continues to be the focus of his rivals' attacks. Hillary Clinton advertises her seven years in the Senate and two terms as First Lady, saying "I am ready to lead on Day One." And the message has gotten through: by clear margins, voters rate her as the more experienced of the two candidates. The fact that this hasn't stopped Obama's momentum doesn't mean he's heard the last of it — not with John McCain, who has spent 26 years on Capitol Hill, the likely Republican nominee. "I'm not the youngest candidate. But I am the most experienced," says McCain. "I know how the world works."
That's seems like a pretty good introduction to the matter.
Bill Clinton's administration - staffed by what many saw as aloof, unbuttoned-down recent college grads - could also have used a good dose of experience early on, which might have helped the Clinton White House avoid monumental political battles over issues such as "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" and the health reform initative's "Harry and Louise" episode.
But check out Daniel Drezner 's piece, "Expecting the Unexpected as President":
As Barack Obama surges ahead in delegates and pubic-opinion polls, Hillary Clinton stresses her 35 years of experience as having prepared her to be the commander-in-chief from day one. This raises an interesting question: What is the best experience to become the leader of the Free World?
The answer is hazy. Some people believe the executive branch should be run like a business. George W. Bush's MBA, however, does not appear to have imbued him with superior management skills. Businessmen like Mitt Romney, Steve Forbes and Ross Perot all excelled in the private sector. But all of them spent great sums of money in their presidential campaigns, with little to show for it.
Senator Clinton seems to suggest that decades of experience in the capital represents the best training for the presidency. Well, maybe -- Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon and George H.W. Bush were the modern presidents with the longest Washington resumes. Each had their moments, but none of them left the Oval Office gracefully. Washington insiders often rack up accomplishments, but at the same time they possess massive blind spots that cripple their presidencies.
Pundits suggest that managing a successful presidential campaign is the best preparation for the Oval Office. This idea is a seductive but tautological. In 2004, experts said Howard Dean was running a brilliant campaign -- until he started losing. Politics is too capricious a business to assume that candidates can control their destiny through superior planning.
As a management question, the problem with being the president is that one cannot anticipate what important issues will arise in the future. No one thought terrorism would be the paramount foreign policy problem during the 2000 campaign. I guarantee you there are issues that will not be talked about during this election year, but will dominate the presidency in 2009 and beyond.
Perhaps the best experience to be president, then, is the ability to successfully cope with the uncertain and the unknown. Of course, some managerial experts would not call that "experience." They would call it "judgment."
Well said.
But back to Time's article. While there are plenty of examples of inexperienced presidents making poor decisions or initiating policies they'd like to take back, there are also examples of great presidents who've blundered.
Certainly crisis decision-making calls for sound judgment and judicious action, like, well, Kennedy in the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Frankly, I would add that in political science and presidential studies there's something known as "the force of circumstance," which means that sometimes presidents are successful when decisions are made in the context of a special set of environmental factors - like an overwhelming problem that gives added weight to presidential leadership, or a decisive election victory that provides the political-institutional momentum for presidential success on some fundamental question of national concern.
Of course, much of this debate centers on leadership in times of danger, and, utlimately, few people have genuinely been challenged in a true trial by fire. Thus, when we recognize great presidential leadership, it's generally when an incumbent has met the test of judgment and leadership at a moment involving the highest stakes of politics and history.
The new American Interest has a symposium on victory in Iraq: "What if We Win? Here's the blurb:
Thanks to a fragile but real improvement in the security situation in Iraq, it has become possible to imagine the United States and its allies achieving what could plausibly be described as a win. But a win how defined, and with what implications? We asked a diverse group of observers to ponder these questions.
It is a diverse group, and I'm still reading through the responses, but since the war's routinely denounced as a neoconservative fiasco, it's not inappropriate to give a neocon the first crack.
Here's one of the greatest dark neocon princes of all, Richard Perle: "We Won Years Ago":
For those who never considered that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq posed any threat to the United States, the idea that we might “win” is, by definition, inconceivable. For those who worried that Saddam’s regime might one day provide weapons of mass destruction to terrorists, the end of his regime was a “win” the day Baghdad fell. For that small and much-maligned group who regarded the invasion of Iraqi as an act of risk management, weighing the costs of war against the risk of leaving Saddam in place and hoping for the best, the notion of victory has been swamped by a debate over its cost.
And the cost has been high—far higher than I believe was necessary. That cost was driven by colossal mismanagement, chronic indecision about strategy, tactics and even goals, confusion about whom to trust among Iraqis and allies alike, a failure to deal effectively with Iranian and Syrian involvement in the conflict, and a shocking level of incompetence within the Bush Administration....
Contrary to the view of many critics of the war, we did not go into Iraq mainly to impose democracy by force in some grand, ambitious (and naive) scheme to transform Iraq and then the region as a whole into a collection of happy democracies. It is notable that the critics who charge that this was our core objective never cite evidence to support their claim....
Without military action we could not have decisively managed the threat from Iraq. It is now managed: Saddam will not be sharing WMD with anyone. Judged against that measure, we have already won in Iraq, despite all the failures of policy and implementation that followed the destruction of his regime. To be sure, that victory has come at a terrible price, and whether it can be sustained remains to be seen. After all, we once “won” against the Soviets in Afghanistan, only to see the Taliban regime, aligned as it was with Osama bin Laden, emerge to threaten us directly in a way Afghanistan never did under Soviet occupation. But in the larger picture, driving the Soviets from Afghanistan, even if the means were crude and even if we suffered later from unintended consequences, was an important factor in our victory in the Cold War, which was the larger picture.
There is a larger picture with respect to Iraq, as well, and there is reason to hope that it will vindicate what we have done there. We have demonstrated in Iraq that we will act to protect ourselves. We have shown that we will fight terrorists where we find them, even when the cost is high. We, and now much of the world, have begun to take terrorism seriously. This is in good measure because we have been willing, in Iraq and Afghanistan, to go beyond the instruments of law enforcement and plaintive pleas to ineffective international institutions on which we once relied. We have, as the always wise Fouad Ajami put it, created, “from Egypt to Kuwait and Bahrain, a Pax Americana [that] anchors the order of the region. In Iraq, the Pax Americana, hitherto based in Sunni Arab lands, has acquired a new footing in a Shiite-led country.”
Such success as we have achieved in Iraq, like the strategic and tactical failures there that went before, is due largely to the (bewilderingly episodic) leadership of President Bush. He found the courage to offer the surge when he was under immense pressure to withdraw. He understood that the advice coming from his Secretary of State amounted to accepting a thinly masked defeat while the advice from Congress amounted to defeat, period.
The gains could be reversed, of course, and if some of the candidates for president have their way, they will be. But it is already significant that Iraq has faded as a partisan political issue, not because there is a shortage of Democrats—the implacable “leadership”, Pelosi and Reid come to mind—who want us out whatever the consequences, but because the turnaround has dimmed the star of withdrawal, retreat and isolation.
After the ordeal that Iraq and the belated but absolutely necessary mobilization against Muslim extremism have imposed on us, it would be the final, tragic irony if what has been achieved were squandered by a new administration more concerned with honoring a foolish, irresponsible commitment to the antiwar sentiment of left-wing Democrats and isolationist Republicans than to the safety of the nation.
The Democrats are definitely "dug in" on retreat, so Pearle concludes appropriately.
But note something important: Pearle's been a "fair-weather" neocon, denouncing the administration and the war in no uncertain terms before the troop surge of 2007, which has made the war look like less of a fiasco after all (more on that here).
With this piece (and perhaps a possible forthcoming and more forthright reverse mea culpa) it seems Perle's returning to his original "dark prince" identity.
There's peripheral controversy over Hillary Clinton's "Who do you want answering the phone?" campaign ad.
The letters "NIG" appear on the child's pajamas in the ad, and there's speculation of a deliberate subliminal message being sent.
Ann Althouse queries, "Why are the letters 'NIG' on the child's pajamas?":
You can see the commercial at the link, and the pajamas in question are on display during seconds 11 and 12. On pausing, staring, and thinking, I believe these are pajamas that say "good night" all over them, but the letters "NIG" are set apart by a fold in the fabric.
Is the campaign responsible for sending out a subliminal message to stimulate racist thoughts in the unsuspecting viewer? It is either deliberate or terribly incompetent. There is no other writing on screen until the very end of the commercial, and if letters appear in anyplace in a commercial, they should be carefully selected letters. Certainly, each image is artfully composed and shot and intended to deliver an emotional impact. Could this be a mere lapse?
In 2000, there was a much-discussed commercial for George W. Bush that displayed the letters "RATS":
The announcer starts by lauding George W. Bush's proposal for dealing with prescription drugs, and criticizes the plan being offered by Vice President Al Gore. Fragments of the phrase ''bureaucrats decide'' -- deriding Mr. Gore's proposal -- then dance around the screen....
The intense scrutiny of the "RATS" ad heightens the assumption that presidential candidates these days pay close attention to any incidental lettering that appears in their ads. "RATS" as part of the word "bureaucrats" in an ad criticizing Gore's prescription plan is nothing compared to "NIG" isolated on a sleeping child's shoulder in an ad intended to create doubts about a black man's ability to take an urgent phone call at 3 a.m., an ad authorized by a candidate who has already heard accusations that her campaign is slipping racial material into its attacks on her opponent.
This is either a revolting outrage or shocking incompetence.
Or Clintonian Machiavellianism.
I'm not shocked in the least, although I would say that "NIG" is not normally used as an abbreviation for the n-word.
NIG's probably just as Althouse surmises: a partial glimpse of letters in a "good night" pattern on the kid's bedtime garment. Makes for excellent political outrage, in any case!
