No Experience Required
Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney make a big deal about how they ran things--a city, a state, a business--while their main Dem opponents never ran anything or met a payroll in their lives. Does this really matter? When it comes to hiring a CEO I would care a lot of about experience, but the Presidency is more about politics. I'm not sure exactly how experience will help you that much once in office--the key is what will you do, not how you do it. I'm not saying it doesn't matter, since you aren't a dictator and have to work with others (as Senators do)--I'm just saying there's only so much you can guess about the success of your management based on past experience, since the job is unique.
Yet, this is an issue that a lot of people seem to care about. They ask does Barack Obama have enough experience? (For some reason, rather than saying he has good ideas, a common defense to this is "did Bush?" Well, yes--for six years he was a highly popular and effective governor of a state that's bigger, richer and more populous than most countries. Meanwhile, a couple years ago, Obama was a state senator.)
All I can say is experience is overrated, and should only be used as a tie-breaker, if then.
posted by LAGuy @ 12:59 AM
7 Comments:
I'm not sure I agree. Suppose that someone spent six years in the Senate (where no single member ever has any really stressful responsibility) and spent the rest of his life as an actor. Isn't there a chance that he might just crack up as President?
I'm not suggesting that FT will do that, but if a voter felt that "proven ability to handle himself under pressure" was an absolute prerequisite for the Presidency, I think that would not be unreasonable.
Even assuming we can see how well people will do under the pressure of the Presidency from previous positions, it's hard for me to see how a particular voter could let this argument make a difference.
Let's say the race is between Giuliani and Clinton--a plausible scenario. Why would some moderate voter pick Giuliani because he has run a city and Clinton has only been a Senator (if you don't count her experience in the White House and ignore their careers as lawyers). I mean aren't there positions so clearly different on a number of pretty serious issues that you'd pick the one who's closer to your beliefs, regardless of other qualities?
Say you believe strongly in, say, tax cuts--it's the biggest issue for you, and there's no number two. Would you vote for someone who campaigns on cutting taxes, but has little experience as a leader, or someone who promises to raise taxes, but has a lot of experience.
By the way, John McCain has spent his political career in the House and the Senate. Think he can take the pressure?
Experience viewed alone is a mistake though it can be relevant- sort of like picking a new car based on the tires. If you care about someone that can deal with a legislature and be able to move an unwieldy executive bureaucracy, a governor has had similar experience & if you care about someone being up to speed and with Washington DC doings and foreign policy, service in the Senate offers some. If one thing is clear, and the Romney experience as an ineffective governor in Massachusetts shows this, governments tend not be like business- with its (to use B-school words) empowered customer base, autonomous divisions and powerful competing boards of directors who all have different ideas of what the bottom line is- and cannot be run like one. In fact, the allure of business people and other outsiders is that they don't have the "experience" i.e. the chains of conventional wisdom and commonly-held assumptions that bind the ruling class
By the way, John McCain has spent his political career in the House and the Senate. Think he can take the pressure?
Okay, let's make this more general. Would you agree with the following?
1. It is reasonable to hesitate to vote for a candidate if you think there is a significant chance that they cannot take the pressure of the Presidency.
2. We can never know for sure whether someone will be able to take this pressure. Still, by analyzing their past history, and how they reacted to difficult situations, we can sometimes make reasonable guesses as to whether they can take pressure.
3. If person 'X' has run a city during a crisis, or run a large state, or a country, and seems to have held up under pressure, then this suggests prima facie that they can handle a lot of pressure.
4. This is true to a much smaller degree about someone who has been in Congress, especially if they came from a rich-kid background and pretty much blended in with the other congresscritters during their tenure. For example, Dan Quayle or Joe Kennedy Jr.
5. Being tortured by the Viet Cong is also an experience that should be taken into account when deciding this.
6. IIRC, there was a candidate not too long ago who had been governor of a small state, and during his tenure had commented that the job was so tough he was sometimes afraid to get out of bed in the morning. (Or something like that -- I am trying to remember the details.) This is prima facie evidence that he would not be able to handle presidential stress.
Interesting points, but let me respond with a basic claim.
There have been good and bad presidents, but I honestly can't think of one that I'd say would have been good but wasn't because he cracked under the pressure,
Success in most jobs, whether it's CEO, football star or hamburger flipper, can be judged by fairly objective standards, but in politics, good or bad is based on what policies you support, and my standards can be the opposite of yours. A candidate who has bad ideas but is so likely to crack that he won't be able to do anything would be better than a candidate who has bad ideas and knows how to get things done.
By the way, we're all friends here--who are you referring to in point 6?
My # 6 point: I remember this story being used in op-eds a few years ago, to criticize the candidate in question. But I honestly am not sure who it was. I thought it was Howard Dean, but when I posted this comment I thought I should verify my facts, and did a google and read the Wikipedia article and couldn't find evidence for this. So I figured it would be potentially slanderous (ethically if not legally) if I said it was Dean when I was in fact uncertain about that.
On the opposite end of someone who can't take being governor, you had Michael Dukakis, who ran on a theme of "competence." He allegedly spent his free time thumbing through volumes on Swedish land development. I don't think any office would have made him go overboard, though the idea of Dukakis cracking up is pretty funny.
Then there's Reagan, who allegedly knew how to delegate power and would be in bed early every night. There are plenty of Presidents who weren't good at delegating power--is that a positive or a negative? And there was at least one President who doubted he was up to the job--Harding. Maybe he was right.
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