Rudy Giuliani and John McCain both agree that if they wind up running against Barack Obama their go-to line of attack will be against his lack of experience. Having just watched the experience issue fail for Hillary Clinton in Iowa, I'm left wondering if experience has ever worked well as an issue in presidential politics. Not for HW Bush in 1992. Not for Richard Nixon in 1960. I could be wrong, but what are the big counterexamples out there?
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The Experience Thing
05 Jan 2008 08:29 pm
Comments (37)
Should Obama be the nominee, the issue or concept motoring the Republican campaign will not be experience; it will be fear. Fear of terrorism, fear of cancer, fear of immigrants, fear of every conceivable issue that might come to mind. They will use Obama's lack of experience to access that fear, but fear is what they'll push. It's uninspiring, it's desperate, but it does have a record of success. It worked for Nixon in 68 and it worked for Bush in 04. There surely are more examples.
It's just a bit rich for Giuliani, the least experienced candidate in the field, to complain about any other candidate's lack of experience. Even Alan Keyes, former U.N. ambassador, has more relevant experience for the job than does Giuliani.
It worked for Churchill against Atlee.
Just about every incumbant president gets reelected because of experience.
Plus when a governor is running they have a distinct advantage over a senator, also due to the experience issue.
And finally, experience lends the ineffable quality of gravitas to a candidate especialy in the matter of foriegn affairs.
I don't think even fear will work this time. The Republicans are burdened by six years of control that saw a huge jump in debt, deficits, incompetence, and a war that, despite its stabilization, is still unpopular. People, enough of them, anyway, will see through their rhetorical tricks.
BTW, Celts v. Pistons game on.
Brian--
I think that it probably makes sense to distinguish incumbency from experience. Along those lines, I also think that it's hard not to see 1864 and 1944 as especially privileging incumbency, and in 1964 Johnson's opponent was probably the most extreme major-party nominee (by the standards of the day) since WJ Bryan.
In short--I'm not sure that the three examples you cite have much (if any) relevance to Obama in 2008.
Re R Johnston's comment "It's just a bit rich for Giuliani, the least experienced candidate in the field ..."
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I don't like Giuliani and I sure hope he doesn't get the Republican nomination.
Nonetheless, Giuliani has years of EXECUTIVE experience --as Mayor of one of our largest and most important cities.
Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards have NO executive experience.
I think it's unfortunate that the Democratic Party does not appreciate Richardson's solid experience --as Secretary of the nuclear DOE. DOE is the source of our most powerful weapons and the best hope for our energy future. Plus, Richardson has been Governor of a State.
I like Barack Obama -- because, at the end of the day, the most important thing is where a leader's heart is --his core values, not his experience. But I think this Hollywood approach the Democratic Party has to the primaries is going to come back and bite us.
Experience worked really well for Al Gore. Well . . . kinda.
GHWB in 88.
Marc -- I didn't mean that as an attack on Obama. As you say, experience usually comes to bear when incumbency is involved. Matt was looking for counter-examples. If FDR's experience in combating a depression and fighting World War II didn't net him a fourth term in 1944, I can only assume Thomas Dewey was an even more incompetent politician than I thought.
I kept waiting for one of the Republicans to point out they will use a group untraceable to themselves to smear dirty lies about Obama.
"I'll just swiftboat him."
Omigod.
Hillary is running based on Bill Clinton's Administration --yet , in response to a question re unilaterally attacking Al Qaeda in Pakistan -- she's reminding us of how that Administration failed repeatedly in its attacks on Bin Laden 10 years ago.
Regarding the first answer for the democrats:
Hillary Clinton is fucking brilliant. She is smart enough to drill down to the details of what is important ie, have missles ready to go and tell Pakistan once their are launched due to tense situation between India and Pakistan.
Everyone else is talking in platitudes.
Todd Collins on the road in Seattle.
To the contrary, Hillary just stepped in deep shit - in several respects.
She indicated that she would attack Al Qaeda in Pakiston by following the same timid approach of Bill Clinton -- launch Tomahawks from a thousand miles away. How did that work in the 1990s --other than encouraging Bin Laden to return the favor on Sept 2001?? That's no way to attack an elusive terrorist enemy.
Plus she noted --inadvertently -- why that approach fails. You have to notify Pakistan of the incoming missiles in advance -- so Pakistan doesn't nuke India. Yet that ensures Al Qaeda supporters in Pakistan's intelligence/military tells Al Qaeda what's coming.
Man, Edwards just gut-punched Clinton.
Edwards was just fantastic.
Ha ha ha
Hillary just launched a shrill attack on Obama based on what she claims was an attack Obama made on John Edwards.
John Edwards then turned around and slapped Hillary in the chops for her attack on Obama, reputing her claim about what Obama had said re Edwards.
Hillary then went into a shrill rant re the "35 years " she has being fighting for change. Which reminds of (a) how little she has accomplished and (b) how old she is
Her desperation is showing --whereas Edwards and Obama seem cool and dignified.
I think HRC just made news, re: withdrawal.
Edwards certainly just blew away any chances of a Clinton-Edwards ticket.
On the other hand, a Edwards-Obama or Obama-Edwards ticket looks like a lock on the nomination. Their values are compatible.
Better start cutting your losses, Haim Saban.
heh heh heh
Experience?
Dole '96, Bitches!
Hillary much sweeter and good tempered after the break. I think her advisers --those with the wet spots on the crotch -- just had a talk with her during the break.
The experience thing?
Only really applies when there is no incumbent running. But even so, I'm 43 and in my lifetime I remember the following elections:
Reagan over the HIGHLY experienced McGovern
Carter over the more experienced Ford
Reagan over the more experienced Carter
Reagan over the HIGHLY experienced Mondale
Bush over the less experienced Dukakis
Clinton over the more experienced Bush
Clinton over the HIGHLY experienced Dole
Bush over the much more experienced Gore (accepting of course that Gore actually won).
Bush over the HIGHLY experienced Kerry.
When two non-incumbents face off, the American public almost seem more likely to chose the less experienced candidate. We probably have to go back to Eisenhower to find an election where the more senior statesman type of candidate won an open election.
In addition, the non-incumbent candidates with the greatest overall experience in the past 50 years almost always seem to lose. Mondale? Dole? Kerry? All 3 were the definition of elder statesmen.
In any event, Obama strikes me as very much in the legacy of Kennedy, Carter and Clinton. None of those 3 had substantive national experience before winning the presidency. All 3 were young (well Carter was a 52 year old 1-term governor) and all were swept into office with much the same enthusiasm that Obama seems to be tapping into today.
Re value of experience, Edwards just made a good point that core personal values and willingness to fight for those values is the key requirement.
Note the importance of not cutting and running in dirty compromises with lobbyists --then cut his eyes over to Hillary.
Re "youth" as a handicap, Richardson notes that John F Kennedy was 42 and was one of our best Presidents.
Hillary notes that Obama voted for 2005 Energy Bill with lots of tax breaks for energy companies.
Hillary keeps saying she's been "agent of change for 35 years" during discussion of health care.
Someone needs to remind us of Hillary's Health Care debacle in 1994.
Edwards responds to Hillary by arguing that you cannot take money from lobbyists, get in bed with lobbyists and then "Challenge Them".
"Experience" also failed for Carter in '80.
I am an Obama supporter. I think he represents a new political landscape that I think has more potential for positive, seismic-scale change than anything Bill Clinton did and anything Hillary Clinton could possibly do.
That said, Barack Obama's experience level is much, much less than that of anyone I can think of who has won the nomination of his respective party. State senate to Senate to President in the span of only a few years is unprecedented in a recent nominee. I happen to think that a very, very keen mind coupled with very good advisors could make up for this, with Obama as a figurehead for the type of deep epistemological change that we should value most--and he lets us think this partly because of his unconventional record. But the point for many voters with the experience issue is real.
I think "experience" did work for Ford; although he lost, he was basically whittling into Carter's once-enormous lead for the entire fall campaign in 1976. Concern over Carter's inexperience was the one thing that kept what should have been a Democratic post-Watergate blowout relatively close.
Lincoln also came out of the Illinois legislature, with only a couple years congressional experience.
Can someone explain to me why the experience card works for Hillary? She was wife of the President, then Senator (for less time than Obama), then President? Why is that better, or am I just missing something?
Experience doesn't really matter because to voters historically because no one running who isn't an incumbent actually has experience being president. Being a governor and having executive experience is much different than running American foreign, defense and trade policy. In addition, former cabinet figure are probably the people with the most relevant experience in that they wielded power within the executive branch, yet they almost never run.
I'm 43 and in my lifetime I remember the following elections:
Reagan over the HIGHLY experienced McGovern
Man, you must have been doing some good drugs back in '72 if that's what you remember . . .
It's laughable that anybody would run on experience after the past 7 years. Cheney and Rumsfield had all the resume you could possibly want and yet they ignored the threat of Al Qaeda until after Bin Laden flew planes into the World Trade Center, failed to capture him and the Taliban leaders in Afghanistan, got us mired into a quagmire in Iraq over fake claims of WOMD, and further inflamed Islamic terrorism and the situation in Iraq by resorting to torture. America doesn't need any more of that kind of experience.
What Ron said. Obama has been saying that judgment is more important than experience to deflect this very attack, and given the clear recent example, of Cheney/Wolfowitz/Rumsfeld/et. al., it should be a potent defense.
Experience seems to work as an argument for an incumbent, and seems to work in primaries sometimes (witness Mondale over Hart, or Dole over the field, or Kerry over the field, all of whom turned out to be pretty mediocre-at-best candidates). Not in the general election among non-incumbents. (Of course, there's not a lot of recent predecent for two non-incumbents running for president, if one counts VPs as "incumbent".)
I wish Biden ran in 04!
Comments closed January 19, 2008.
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Heads in the Sand
Abraham Lincoln in 1864 ("Don't swap horses in the middle of the stream.") FDR in '44. And, in a sense, LBJ in '64 -- in that he had the experience to know that lobbing a nuclear missile into the Kremlin wouldn't solve our problems.
Posted by Brian | January 5, 2008 8:38 PM