Of Elections and Experience

Has anyone else had their fill of both parties' fetishistic fixation on "experience" in this election campaign?

First, Hillary Clinton, after perusing her own policy platform and that of Barack Obama and finding precious little difference between the two, had little choice but to fall back on the purported experience gap between them as her ace in the hole. Once the wily Obama nonetheless unseated her and won the nomination himself, Republicans wasted little time in picking up where Hillary had left off, warning American voters not to trust a rookie Senator with the position of leader of the free world. It was almost certainly in partial response to this criticism that Senator Obama selected as his running mate knock-around Senate veteran Joe Biden (one of the most voluble members of an institution notorious for its stable of pompous blowhards). Biden's 36 years of Senate experience, Democrats argued, more than offset Obama's green-as-grass pedigree, particularly in the area of foreign policy. Then Republican nominee John McCain selected first-term Alaska governor Sarah Palin as his running mate, opening himself up to retaliatory Democratic assaults on her inexperience. Since that announcement, the campaign has--I hope temporarily--degenerated into a to-and-fro argument between Democrats and Republicans, not over whether experience matters to the presidency nor over how important it is, but over which ticket is more experienced and therefore better entrusted with the presidency.

What gives?

As I already pointed out in a response to a comment on one of my earlier posts, neither Senator Obama nor Governor Palin would be the first top-tier executive in the United States government without extensive experience in that field, whether in the executive or legislative realm. Nor would either candidate be the first successful such executive, should either one end up performing well on the job, of course. Abraham Lincoln (remember him? saved the Union? freed the slaves? or at least kick-started the process that ultimately freed them?) was a railsplitter, lawyer, Illinois state legislator and Congressmen before becoming President. Not much experience there, quite frankly. Theodore Roosevelt was not only not very experienced--he served as Assistant Secretary of the Navy for about a year, as New York Governor for about two years and as Vice President for less than a year before moving into the White House--he was also the youngest president ever, replacing the slain William McKinley as president at the tender age of 42. Both their faces--Republican faces--have graced Mount Rushmore for eighty-odd years.

Nor have all arguably experienced presidents turned out to be terribly good ones. Richard Nixon served as a congressman for six years, and then as Vice President for eight. Those years of experience, apparently, did not teach him enough humility or respect for the law to avoid Watergate. Lyndon Johnson's twelve years as a Texas Congressman and further twelve years as a Texas Senator did nothing to help him handle the Vietnam War any better than he did. And it's not only past presidents who make for useful case studies in how unreliable "experience" is as a gauge of a given candidate's public policy judgment. Joe Biden's much-ballyhooed foreign-policy experience on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee did not stop him from making a series of hopelessly wrong calls in the domain of US foreign policy over the past couple of decades. It did not stop him from voting against the first Gulf War in 1991 or for the invasion of Iraq in 2003, or from opposing the undeniably successful troop surge in 2007. Nor did it stop him from advancing his understandable yet nonetheless misguided and ill-conceived proposal to split up Iraq along ethnic and sectarian lines in ways that would almost certainly have proven practically unfeasible, would have exacerbated sectarian divisions both in Iraq and in the Middle East at large, and would have vastly strengthened Iran's geopolitical position in the region at America's expense.

Every time I hear Democrats and Republicans joust over this or that candidate's experience, I wonder why no one seems to remember that George W. Bush deliberately surrounded himself with quite experienced Cabinet secretaries--many of them alumni of his father's administration--partly to compensate for his own complete lack of foreign policy know-how. Rumsfeld, Cheney, Powell, Wolfowitz--these Bush Administration luminaries and more had been kicking around Washington for decades, amassing copious amounts of foreign policy experience before ascending to the heights of the executive branch of the US government. This did not stop any of them from utterly bollixing up the occupation of Iraq during the four years between the invasion and the surge.

Vice President Dick Cheney, the first President Bush's secretary of defense, cogently made the practical case against invading Iraq in 1991, pointing out the quite foreseeable difficulties of keeping the peace between the Sunnis and Shiites, suppressing the inevitable nationalist and Islamist resistance to any US military presence on Arab soil, staving off a lurking Iran, and keeping the restive Kurds from rocking the boat in the north of the country. This was to say nothing of the task of divvying up the country's oil and gas spoils between all of the above parties to everyone's satisfaction. Yet this cautionary wisdom of the early 1990s seems to have been completely lost on him in 2002 and 2003.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, for his part, was reportedly hell-bent on using Iraq as a testing ground for his plans to reform the US military into a nimble, agile force that could strike deep into enemy territory at record speed, overthrow and defeat America's enemies, and come home in a prompt and timely fashion. It seems not to have occurred to him that he might have an insurgency and an incubating civil war on his hands shortly thereafter. He thus did not plan for the kind of military presence in Iraq that could have quelled either the insurgency or the Sunni-Shiite troubles in their infancy. Thousands of American troops and tens, and perhaps even hundreds, of thousands of Iraqis have paid the price for his incompetence--which his decades of experience totally failed to correct.

What, then, is the significance of experience as a presidential qualification anyway? Can we not expect either presidential candidate, not to mention his vice president, to be surrounded by advisers and managers who will guide him through the nitty-gritty of running the country? In light of this--and many other considerations too numerous and intricate to scrutinize here--can we not agree that judgment is a far more reliable and significant barometer of how well or how poorly a given candidate would perform as president? Must we rely so heavily on a crass tally of how many years he has spent wheeling and dealing, pork-barreling and just generally bullshitting in any elected office at any level of government?

Just a question.