Are You Experienced?
Ever since 9/11, there's been a certain political presumption: The next presidential résumé will have to be heavy on foreign policy and national security cred. Oh, and one more thing: Anyone who has already run for the presidency has a clear leg up. Stir all the conventional wisdom together, and the candidacy of, say, Sen. John McCain comes to mind. Last election's maverick is now the GOP front-runner-oozing experience and authority, road-tested, and ready to roll. At the opposite end of the spectrum: Barack Obama, the 45-year-old political sensation who was treading the halls of the Illinois state legislature just three years ago. Imagine: a political newbie impatient with the world's greatest deliberative body! The notion that Obama might be even remotely qualified to be president was swatted down by none other than the very experienced Dick Cheney a few months ago: "I think people might want a little more experience than that," he told Sean Hannity. "Given the nature of the times we live in."
Given the nature of the dark places experience has led us lately, we might just want to rethink that assumption a bit.
It's tricky, this idea of experience-because it's so darned fickle. Remember when another vice president, Richard Nixon, tried to belittle the young Jack Kennedy in 1960? The estimable Theodore White, in The Making of the President 1960, recounts one of Nixon's strategic themes-"that the times were too grave for America to try inexperienced leadership." ("Incidentally," Nixon sniffed about the young Massachusetts senator, "I have talked with Khrushchev," then the man to see in Moscow.) Nixon's gambit, of course, failed miserably-particularly after the presidential debates in which Kennedy made it clear he was not a callow youth, unprepared for the big dance.
In Campaign 2008, experience will become all things to all candidates: a vice (if you're short on it); a virtue (if you're touting it). It will be sliced-into managerial experience, world experience, life experience, even New Hampshire experience, if only by marriage. (Hillary Rodham Clinton in Nashua, N.H.: "... I know what Karl Rove tells people privately. ... I'm the one person they are most afraid of. Bill and I have beaten them before, and we will again.") As for Washington experience, watch out: Too much Washington, and you're a captive. Too little? Declare your outsidership. (Obama in Springfield, Ill.: "I know I haven't spent a lot of time learning the ways of Washington. But I've been there long enough to know that the ways of Washington must change.")
Change. Experience, once the sine qua non of presidential politics, has been reduced to just another debating point-and with good reason. If Washington's most experienced hands had a) prosecuted the war in Iraq differently, b) managed a well-run Department of Homeland Security, or c) reformed healthcare, Social Security, or immigration policy, experience might still be the coin of the political realm. The Bush administration's seriatim blunders, however, have seriously devalued the currency. That's bad news for McCain and for veteran Senate Democrats like Joe Biden, Chris Dodd, and Clinton, who has been busily polishing her national security résumé-just as record numbers of Americans sour on a war she supported.
The November midterm elections made it clear that the commodity most valued by the American public, at least for now, is change. So we're seeing a recalibration of candidates' talking points and vantage points. John Edwards, for instance, has left the Senate completely. And just last week, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney-a former Massachusetts governor and successful entrepreneur who rescued the 2002 Olympics from ruin-decided to emphasize his brand of managerial experience as the kind you ought to vote for. "I do not believe Washington can be transformed from within by a lifelong politician," he said, taking a jab at frontrunner McCain. What's more, he added, Washington can't be run "by someone who has never even run a corner store, let alone the largest enterprise in the world." Take that, Barack Obama.
Obama has an answer for that: It's judgment that really matters. After all, he often says, didn't Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld have lots of experience? Sure, it's a good argument-and it may even work. Old-fashioned experience doesn't have the cachet it once carried, and that's a good thing. But make no mistake: Americans will never stop looking for the most capable candidate. This time, though, they may rework the résumé.
This story appears in the February 26, 2007 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.
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