No amount of experience can prepare person for presidency

No amount of experience can prepare person for presidency


By Nigel Hamilton
The Providence Journal

Published: Saturday, Jan. 19, 2008 12:39 a.m. MST

BOSTON — Much has been made in the Democratic presidential campaign of "experience" — Hillary Rodham Clinton's versus Barack Obama's.
From the biographer's and historian's perspectives, this is an interesting point. Clinton's first political experience was as a Young Republican, then as a student activist alongside her boyfriend at Yale Law School, Democrat Bill Clinton. Following him to Fayetteville, she taught law at the University of Arkansas and then became a corporate lawyer, once he stood for Arkansas attorney general and governor.

Her successful work for education reform in Arkansas was conducted on behalf of her husband — as was her ill-fated health-care reform when he became president. Yes, she constantly gained in experience as a wife, a mother, an activist and a lawyer — but her own trajectory as an elected political official dates only from 2000, when she stood for the U.S. Senate in New York, four years before Obama stood for the U.S. Senate in Illinois.

Obama, having been previously elected to the Illinois Senate, in 1997, is therefore a more experienced elected politician than the former first lady, though a political generation younger. The real question is, therefore: What experience best fits a candidate to become a modern president?

The answer is that there is no experience that can be counted on to prepare a politician to lead the American people. One way in which a voter can perform a reality check, however, is to match the candidate against a previous politician or government executive of similar ilk and personality.

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http://deseretnews.com/dn/view/0,5143,695245312,00.html

ready from day one. Sure she can call her Clinton folks to come in to do the work....but if Obama gets in, so can he. That's the part that escape those who want to tell us about all of this "I get things done" propaganda.