9-18-08, 9:33 am

As the 2008 presidential campaign continues, the question of “experience” has been put forward as major issue. First, Hillary Clinton used it against Barack Obama during the Democratic primaries, and then the Republicans took up the issue after Obama secured the nomination. When John McCain surprised most observers by choosing Sarah Palin as his running mate, the Democrats began to use the issue against the Republicans.

But few are asking what sort of “experience” qualifies someone for the presidency? Progressives value experience which encourages innovation and flexibility. Conservatives usually praise experience which helps implement existing policies effectively. How do the two tickets display these differences?

Also, how should experience be judged when both African Americans like Obama and women like Palin were long denied elemental citizenship rights and with that any chance to become state or national political leaders?

What kind experience only apply to elected office?

In a great many countries, leaders come from more diverse backgrounds than in the US where they have mostly been lawyers and career politicians leaders are much more likely to come from the trade union movement arts, sciences, and professions, often as activists in non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Such organizations do the grassroots work that Palin and former Mayor Giuliani disparaged when they mocked Senator Obama’s service as a community organizer on Chicago’s South Side in the 1980s, a time when Reagan era propaganda portrayed social activists as losers, while stockbrokers driving BMW’s and drinking lattes were viewed as the wave of the future.

But the kind of experience that Barack Obama chose to have in Chicago in the 1980s and 1990s is valued as an antidote to the domination of politics by professional career politicians and an essential feature of a modern democracy. Politicians like McCain and especially Palin, both of whom exhibit qualities that old fashioned social psychologists connect to “authoritarian personalities,” see that kind of experience as disruptive to the existing power structure, which in reality they hope to advance in and serve.

What sorts of experience has mattered in US history? Military fame often helped candidates win the presidency, especially in the 19th century. But this fame was connected to an expansionist frontier society, where politicians called themselves “colonel” or “captain” for self-advancment. Career politicians often exaggerated and sometimes invented their military accomplishments. Professional soldiers like Zachary Taylor and U.S. Grant gained the presidency because of real military achievements. Grant was followed by a string of career politician Republican presidents who wore their civil war ranks on their sleeves.

John McCain has extensive military experience, but not remotely like Taylor, Grant or Eisenhower in any real leadership position. He was, as few are willing to say, a celebrity POW, which earns him sympathy from the electorate. His record as a naval aviator was mediocre at best. Earlier, he was near the bottom of his class at Annapolis. Throughout his military career he clashed with the first principle of military life; obey orders without comment.

McCain often alludes to his prisoner of war experience to ward off attacks on him as a candidate of wealth and privilege. But, were he not the son of an admiral who commanded the Pacific fleet at the time, his bravado toward his captors might very well have cost him his life. Also, although it is probably impossible for McCain to even contemplate this, Richard Nixon’s extension of the war for four years not only cost hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese lives and thousands of US lives but kept him a POW for four more years.

Were presidents with extensive pre-presidential experience in politics and government better than others? James Buchanan, William McKinley, William Howard Taft, Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover and Richard Nixon all had extensive experience as congressman, governors, cabinet members, Vice Presidents. None are regarded as good presidents. Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, FDR, had much more limited experience in appointed or elective office. They are regarded, along with Abraham Lincoln, a one-term Illinois Congressman and unsuccessful Senate candidate, as good to great presidents.

If history is any guide, successful leadership is not so much about the “experience” one would find on a job applicant’s resume than about having a plan of action or work to achieve goals, tactics to adjust that plan to changing conditions, and most of all an effective “human relations” approach to both the people you are working with and the general public.

History has shown in the US, this progressive approach to experience, stressing innovation and flexibility, has worked better than the conservative approach, which stresses continuity of policy. Presidents as diverse as Herbert Hoover and Lyndon Johnson, both with great experience and success in business and political leadership respectively “stayed the course” during the great depression and the Vietnam War with disastrous consequences. Presidents as diverse as Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt, with far less executive or leadership experience in business or politics, responded to far reaching crises with flexibility and creativity and literally saved the country.

Barack Obama and Joe Biden complement each other and bring together diverse talents and achievements. Obama particularly has shown himself as both flexible and an innovator, the essence of the progressive definition of experience.

Neither John McCain nor Sarah Palin have shown that they have, even as Republicans, any leadership ability in regard to strategy, tactics, and human relations, which is not about Hollywood TV images. McCain and Palin bring together Hollywood images of independent men and feisty women “standing up “to assorted villains and special interests. They promise do the same thing all over again only better – find more oil, fight the Iraq War and new wars more successfully, verbally fight “special interest lobbyists” who have proliferated since the 1980s that their party brought about.

The Obama-Biden ticket is experience for substantive change, for those who believe that substantive change is necessary. The McCain-Palin ticket is, as critics to say about Margaret Thatcher, experience for a “better yesterday,” a remake of the Bush administration with the promise of a better cast of characters. Spin doctors aside, the choice has rarely been more clear.