The Experience Myth: What it takes to be President of the United States.

I am seeing more and more people questioning Obama's "experience" as if it was necessary to know everything that there is to know before setting foot into the White House. Let me tell you: A person off the street can be a qualified President. It is not experience that is important it is judgment.

You can bring five people into a single room, each with the cumulated experience of 50 or more years on the same subject, and each of them can have a different opinion. A President's job is not to already know the answer, but to have the ability to sort through the facts and the fictions, and come up with a workable solution.

To that end every President has a team of advisors. Each President has the ability to draw upon the wealth of knowledge in the United States - if not the world - but this does a President no good if they lack the judgment required to make good decisions.

However, there are still even more important things. A President must have the ability to lead and get Congress to stand behind his proposals. If you cannot get the support of the Congress then you are a lame duck President.

Additionally, you have to get the American People to stand behind you as well. This takes more than just good policies. This takes the ability to inspire and motivate them.

Obama has proven himself on all of these fronts. He was against the Iraq War before it even began. He spoke out against it as he was about to enter an election campaign for the Senate. He had more to lose than those voting for it, because at the time the war was popular. Everyone was behind it. However, Barack spoke out and painted the picture of what we see today. This proves that he had foresight and good judgment. This proves that he clearly saw what those in the Senate did not.

Obama has a record of getting tough legislation passed in the Illinois Senate. He understands how to work with people who might not agree with him, and he does not lose site of what is important. He is grounded in reality and strives for what is achievable, while having a record of always pushing for more.

So far Obama has been the source of record turn outs in these Primary Elections. He's proven that he can draw in others that do not identify themselves as Democrats, which will only strengthen our party moving forward. Those who vote for a Democrat today are more likely to vote Democratic again tomorrow.

If Obama is the nominee there will be a wave of people in local and state elections who will be able to ride his coattails to victory. This strengthens us around the nation. This could very well give us the majority we need in the Senate and the House. We need those majorities badly because moving forward there is a lot of work to do repairing the damage done by Bush.

Experience is a straw man and distracts from the real argument: Judgment. No President is an island. No President acts without first consulting with his advisors. This is no less true of a President Obama, a President Clinton or a President Edwards. The only experience advantage a President Clinton has over a President Obama or a President Edward's is her ability to find all the light switches in the White House.

on the other hand, experience comes from bad judgement.

When he said that no one had a better resume than Dick Cheney or Donald Rumsfeld, it summed it all up for me. Loads of experience can lead you to bad decisions all the time.

The media and/or early states already got rid of 3 of the most experienced candidates :cry:, and the other two have a slim chance.

Of the 3 left, their experience is pretty similar, say compared to the other ~200 million adults in this country. Lots of political experience, some legislative experience, some law experience. They're all 3 extremely bright people. Any of them will campaign hard against the GOP nominee

So "we" already decided experience doesn't matter so much, and there is only one seriously experienced candidate on the other side (McCain) but that's not really going to be the deciding factor between the Dem nominee and McCain.

I wish their campaigns and folks here would move on to the issues and the future. If they're all so worried about hope/change/fighting/the future, can we talk about that?

I don't want a President without experience either. It's the most important job in the world.
The security and future of the world is literally in this person's hands. I don't think experience can be trivialized in considering a candidate for the presidency.

all the experience in the world doesn't make up for not being able to demonstrate to the Congress that the people support your plans and policies. The Clinton experience is in not being able to do that, and using their political skills for survival, not leadership.

In other words, once President the only votes that matter are the 535 people at the other end of the mall.

their constituents are in favor of the President's plans. That's how you get them to vote for things. If you only operate inside the bubble, you'll not get much done.

If you think so, why hasn't Obama taken a more progressive populist approach in his campaign platform?

just she and Congress, if she's elected? Every president tries to directly to the people to break legislative logjams; most fail. Obama can succeed, in my opinion.

I think executive experience is helpful.
You've read all the stories about what an incompetent manager Rice is.
If you think about Bush, do you have any sense that he is a competent manager of the US executive branch?
The President is managing the biggest enterprise on earth: he's CEO and COO.

Need to be able to delegate AND take responsibility for the results that were delegated (Bush never takes responsibility)
Need to be able to find/inspire/manage people to do their absolute best (obviously a Bush failing since he only found syncophants)
Need to manage external relations (I looked Putin in the eye and can see his soul, comes to mind)
Need to be able to pull the best from and question the best from the agencies of government (thats not telling the NIE what it should contain, its making sure that everything important is absorbed in it)

I don't think that passing legislation is anything like the job the president has.
Sadly, governorships might be better training since managing a large State government is probably closer to being President than any other job in the country.

IMHO

"At the age of 25, Lincoln was first elected to the Illinois legislature as a Whig, where he served for 8 years. In 1846 he was elected to Congress, where he served one term. These comprised his entire experience in elective office before he became president."

http://www.exploredc.org/index.php?id=91

On the other hand, people with loads of executive experience: Herbert Hoover, Richard Nixon, Richard Bruce Cheney, Don Rumsfeld.

Obviously, experience is only meaningful in relationship to a person's character and judgement.

In fact, it can be more dangerous than having neither. Sort of like driving a fast, powerful car without caring about how many pedestrians you hit.

But character without experience CAN be just as bad. The Rebpus are already generally perceived as "the daddy party" who keep the trains running on time. A Democratic president who is (or is portrayed by the media as) imcompetent could set us back many years. That was much of Jimmy Carter's problem, whether he deserved it or not.

The US government is a huge bureaucracy. Despite what you might think, it doesn't run by itself. Moreover, Bush has been screwing it up for 7 years, quite possibly on purpose, attempting to kill the entire concept of government. He has also replaced competent career professionals with loyal "Bushies" in just about every single agency, to include the military. It's gonna take a LOT of hard work, close attention, and sheer balls to ferret out all the miscreants. Furthermore, our dealings with other countries are greater and more varied than at any time in our history. And while we don't have a Soviet Union pointing thousands of missiles at us 24/7, there are people who will want to test the new leader and see how far they can push him or her.

I guess the point I'm working toward is that you can't really compare government in the time of Abraham Lincoln to what it takes to run things now. Heck, even the smaller states have more impact on people's lives today than the federal government did back then. About the ONLY part of it that was comparable was the role of commander in chief (and then, no overseas "entaglements," but having a civil war probably made up for it) and that Lincoln came very very close to getting irreparably wrong.

You want a repeat performance?

And no, I don't think Obama would be as bad. But I really don't think you want to hold W up as the standard to which he should aspire.

That's my problem with him. In the past, everybody I ever knew who ran for president had been around a while, had a past, had made news. Obama seemed to show up out of the fog with a bright ribbon him.
Maybe next time.