With another debate between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton on tap, it looks like we will again have to deal with the experience question. It’s the wrong question.
The issue of Barack Obama’s experience punctuated with variations on the old “all talk, and no action,” stereotype makes you glad you live in the age of web pages rather than paper pages, for if we did not we would have one heck of a pile of toilet paper. To Google “Obama and Kennedy” is to turn up several hundred so-called bloggers whose facile comparisons add little to the discussion.
The truth is that anyone with even a rudimentary knowledge of American history can dig up examples of Presidential candidates who were ridiculed for their lack of experience. Here are a few choice ones; see if you can pick out who was the candidate:
1. [He is] an inexperienced “young genius” who would lead the nation to “self-destruction” if elected to the Presidency.
2. The candidates are both men of but little political experience, who came into statesmanship out of other highly intellectual callings.
3. It is the opinion of certain of the advocates of Mr. X that Y has had no experience in public affairs.
4. [He is] a boy scout.
5. He is an amiable man who would like very much to be president but has no discoverable qualifications for the office.
6. What a disaster for the country – a failed haberdasher.
The last one should be a dead give-away, since it was a favorite epithet tossed at Harry Truman. The quote comes from Alistair Cooke on his first meeting with the new President. Number one was Dwight Eisenhower’s opinion of John Kennedy. Number two comes from Harvard President Charles Eliot about both candidates in the 1916 election: Woodrow Wilson and Charles Evans Hughes. Number three is a New York Times editorial, with James G. Blaine the Mr. X and Grover Cleveland the Y. The “boy scout” was Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the opinion of literary critic Edmund Wilson. Number five was journalist Walter Lippmann’s assessment of FDR.
The point of this little quiz is that you can pick just about anyone who ever ran for President and find someone who said they did not have enough experience. There are a few exceptions: Herbert Hoover probably had more experience than any President up to his time (we’ll leave out the founders for obvious reasons), the other one was Richard Nixon. So much for experience.
What history does tell us is that the “experience duds”– those Presidents who come into office with a great deal of experience but turned out to be failures–were handicapped by philosophical rigidity and/or personality problems. Herbert Hoover, of course, represents the classic case. Richard Nixon is exhibit A of the personality problem. John Adams and John Quincy Adams are often cited as other examples.
Anyone who would dare predict the shape of an Obama Presidency is an idiot or ignores the one lesson history does teach and that is there is no predicting whether a candidate will become a great President or a mediocre one. Certainly those Republicans who eight years ago asked the nation to take a chance on a Texas governor who hardly had a distinguished leadership record should be careful about basing a campaign on experience.
In fact that former Texas governor has left his successor with the biggest mess since Herbert Hoover left the White House. On top of that both political parties are a mess. The Democrats include 40-plus Blue Dogs who think any bill that isn’t revenue-neutral is a fire hydrant. On the GOP side of the aisle, an equally bizarre group believes God whispers in their ears and tells them it is wrong to kill the “unborn” but right to fry people in the electric chair.
No situation in American history matches the scope of the mess George W. Bush has created. Literally every system in America along with our foreign relations is in deep trouble. To deal with these problems will require a lack of rigidity and a personality that can rally the American people. Contrary to the ridiculous assertion that withdrawing from Iraq will merely require throwing a dart at a calendar, extricating ourselves from this mess will not be easy. To avoid the contemporary equivalent of “who lost China,” a President Obama will have to secure bipartisan support.
The tax cuts and economic mess are issue number two. Here Obama’s own party will be as much a problem as the GOP. The Blue Dogs will have Obama seeing red. If framed as an issue of equity–in hard time everyone must sacrifice–a President Obama could put his eloquence to good use in breaking the “no new taxes” deadlock.
Every new President represents a blank slate on which will be recorded the judgment of history. No one could have foreseen the greatness of Abraham Lincoln nor could they have known that one of the most difficult decisions of the last century–the use of the atomic bomb–would be waiting on the desk of that failed haberdasher, Harry Truman. If electing a President were merely a matter of fortune telling, we could let Las Vegas odds-makers call the shots.
What we do know about choosing Presidents has to do with two issues the media don’t want to talk about. First, as much as we deny it, electing a President is a personality contest. The more people believe in a candidate, the more goodwill and, yes, hope, that candidate brings to the White House. Hope was the key theme of Franklin Roosevelt’s famous “we have no fear” Inaugural. Herbert Hoover had a long resume and a list of remedies, but he did not enjoy the confidence of the American people.
The more critical ignored ingredient is values. People had no idea what Franklin Roosevelt was going to do–and if they had, they might have had more doubts. Had the Hundred Days been one of today’s ubiquitous position papers, it would have been chewed to death before FDR ever walked through the doors of the White House. Instead Roosevelt articulated a clear set of values that would govern his Presidency.
The American people are not naive. They know that any specific proposal about health care or the mortgage crisis will inevitably be reshaped by Congress, and perhaps even the courts. What they do want to know is what principles will guide that process.
Barack Obama has clearly captured the hearts of millions of Americans with his winning personality and his optimism. What we all want to hear more about is his principles. Hope and change are not principles. Health care proposals are not principles. If Obama fails to do a better job of articulating his core values he will lose the White House because eventually people will see him only as a personality or conversely as a candidate with a phonebook-thick list of programs ala John Kerry. What Obama needs now is a “Forgotten Man” speech like the one Franklin Roosevelt delivered in 1932 or Harry Truman’s Kiel Auditorium speech.
Right now Obama is an empty vessel into which a lot of Americans have poured their own hopes. Without principles, that vessel becomes a sieve.
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