Experience and the Race for the White House in 2008
by Jonathan Singer, Sun Jul 15, 2007 at 11:53:24 AM EDT
Over in The New York Times Sunday magazine this week, Matt Bai takes a look at this year's crop of leading presidential candidates an opines on the fact that the amount of electoral experience each has is remarkably small in comparison to candidates in years past. Perhaps. Bai writes, for instance, "Obama [...] would set a new precedent for inexperience in the White House", a statement that is demonstrably false -- Abraham Lincoln served just two years in the United States House of Representatives, while Obama will have served four years in the United States Senate by the time the next President is inaugurated.
But even leaving aside a debate over the relative levels of experience of candidates past and present, I want to take a brief look at the argument made by many, including to an extent Bai, that prior experience is important to the success of a President or, similarly, that there is some correlation between a candidate's résumé and his success as a President.
Were one looking for examples of presidencies that were not particularly successful potentially as a result of the lack of electoral experience of the chief executive, one could certainly bring up the current administration, as well as the Carter administration. Prior to entering the White House, the two men had served a combined 10 years as Governors, and one could plausibly argue that this played a role in some of the problems of their presidential administrations.
Yet one need not look far to find examples of men who on paper appeared to be supremely qualified to serve as President but who did not in fact end up making great, or even mediocre, Presidents. Take James Buchanan, for example, whose C.V. included one term in the Maryland House of Representatives, five terms in the United States House of Representatives (including one term as chairman of the Judiciary Committee), two years as minister to Russia, more than 10 years as United States Senator, four years as Secretary of State and four years as minister to Great Britain. Few other Presidents boasted such a high level of experience before entering the White House. Yet Buchanan's presidency was no doubt a failure as the United States edged closer and closer to civil war. One might argue, perhaps fairly, that the Civil War was not the fault of Buchanan. Nevertheless, his experience clearly did not prepare him to stave off the internal conflict. Similarly, Richard Nixon's experience as Congressman, Senator and Vice President did not stop him from undertaking actions unbecoming of a President (to say the least); Lyndon Johnson's experience as Congressman, Senator, Senate Majority Leader and Vice President did not stop him from making the blunder of escalating the Vietnam War; Herbert Hoover's experience as a quasi-domestic czar during World War I, Commerce Secretary and leader of the recovery effort after the great Mississippi River flood of 1927 did not prepare him to adequately respond to the Great Depression; the list goes on.
At the same time, one need look no further than Lincoln for an example of a tremendously successful presidential administration that did not have at its core a President who had much to boast in his résumé when he first ran. Theodore Roosevelt, who had spent two years each as Governor of New York, state Assemblyman and Assistant Secretary of the Navy prior to being elected Vice President and who served less than a year in that position before assuming the presidency following the assassination of William McKinley, is another example of a President whose successes as President were not incumbent on a long list of elective offices held before becoming head of the executive branch.
I don't mean to understate the importance of experience, that we should next elect as President someone who has never held a job in his or her life or even someone who has had successes in his or her career but who has not had any experience in government. That said, I'm highly skeptical of the contention that there is much of any correlation between a candidate's level of experience and his or her success as President. History has shown it not to be the case too many times for it to be true.
Tags: experience, President 2008 (all tags)
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