I’ve been waiting for someone to make this argument as effectively as Ari Berman does here:
I’d like to suggest that “experience” — a buzzword every election cycle — is also overrated.
At every turn Hillary Clinton invokes her years as First Lady and New York Senator as a not-so-subtle contrast to Barack Obama’s supposed inexperience. In his piece criticizing Obama this morning, my colleague David Corn writes that Clinton and John Edwards are “steeped in the nuances, language, and minefields of foreign policy.”
That tenure prompted both Clinton and Edwards to support the war in Iraq, along with virtually the entire Democratic foreign policy elite. They had years of PhDs, postings abroad and negotiations with dictators (the kind bemoaned by Clinton and embraced by Obama in last night’s YouTube debate) under their belt. And they came down on the wrong side of the biggest foreign policy question of their generation.
So it’s a little disturbing to see Clinton surrogates like former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright giving reporters a tutorial today on how to negotiate with hostile regimes. In a follow-up interview with a newspaper in Iowa, Hillary piled on by calling Obama’s comments “irresponsible and frankly naive.”
Let’s step back a second. The Obama camp could argue that it was “irresponsible and frankly naive” for Senator Clinton to hand President Bush a blank-check to go to war and then claim that she was only giving the Administration the authorization to win over the United Nations and keep weapons inspectors in Iraq until they finished the job. It was painfully obvious, except maybe to Senators and their advisors in Washington, that Bush would use Congressional approval as a mandate to invade.
Those senators he’s talking about were the ones with experience.
I have not signed on to any bandwagon and I remain in flux about who I’d like in the White House when the disastrous Bush years finally come to a close.
But having spent the last 17 years talking with politicians and candidates at the local and state level, I know that experience is really only a small part of the equation.
First, experience tends to favor incumbents. Incumbents, by virtue of being in office, are more experienced.
In the case of the current crop of Democrats, for instance, experience should favor Joe Biden and Bill Richardson (maybe Chris Dodd). Anyone ready to get behind their gray eminences?
Second, experience is meaningless if there is no vision. Successful candidates — and presidents, etc. — have vision. Ronald Reagan had vision (I disagreed with it, but he had it) and John Kennedy had vision. Neither had the kind of experience one might think is required to sit in teh White House.
Jimmy Carter also lacked experience. But that’s not what I think killed his presidency. It was his lack of any real sense of where the country had to go, a lack of focus that could organize his policies and capture the imagination of the country.
Having someone with experience might be nice, but it’s not necessarily the best option.
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Hank Kalet 