Opinions

Is "experience" overrated? You bet your ballot it is

Online | August 30, 2008

Boca Raton, Florida, my hometown, is an astonishingly dull place, and accordingly I had a lot of free time on my hands this summer, which I spent watching the talking heads on cable news stations. Admittedly, Bill O’Reilly is really, really funny for the first twenty minutes, but there’s only so much of FOX News that I can handle in one sitting. So, out of desperation, I turned to the commentators of CNN and MSNBC, all of whom seemed to be obsessed with one thing during this presidential election: experience.

I’ve managed to distill the following information from cable news, after many hours of careful observation:

• Barack Obama lacks experience.
• John McCain has experience.
• Joe Biden has some experience, particularly about other countries.
• Sarah Palin has experience as a mother.
• FOX News likes to repeat that they have the most experienced reporters in the field.
• I have experience in making fun of Bill O’Reilly.

But nowhere in all of this have I actually been sold on the concept that experience is relevant in selecting a presidential candidate. It’s been taken as a given that having done one job in the past is the determining factor of how effectively one will perform a similar one in the future; my question is, “why?”

Experience in Washington, I’ve come to realize, is a code phrase meaning “this person has played the political game and will uphold the system as it exists.” It has little, if anything, to do with specific policy positions or actual, job-relevant knowledge.

For instance, Barack Obama’s career as a professor of constitutional law at the University of Chicago is consistently downplayed by both his campaign and the media, despite it being an extremely salient argument in favor of his presidency. This is puzzling for two reasons: first, his sample responses to his own law school exams were what started me on the path to supporting him in the first place; and second, a candidate with a demonstrable grasp of what is or is not constitutional would resonate well with Americans who, under President Bush, have tragically become familiar with what it feels like when their government ignores the Bill of Rights. Nevertheless, Mr. Obama is characterized as “inexperienced” by the media, and the American people — not knowing any better — mindlessly repeat it.

On the other end of the spectrum, John McCain, perhaps as a product of his trust-inspiring gray hair and habit of being reelected by the state of Arizona, is considered “very experienced.” This is, to say the least, puzzling. Mr. McCain’s political career effectively began when he was captured by North Vietnamese and, memorably, shouted, “Fuck you, you goddamned slant-eyed cocksuckers,” solidifying his image as a maverick fighting it out for the common man. It continued through his four terms as a US Senator from Arizona, during which he, slightly less memorably, called his wife a “cunt” after she commented on his thinning hair at a campaign stop. No one can deny that Mr McCain is a patriot who has served as an exemplary senator who has voted his conscience (including in instances where he breaks with the Republican party line), and who also has the foulest mouth in Washington. But none of this is relevant in the least to his candidacy.

Mr. McCain’s tenure as a senator is, without a doubt, longer and filled with more triumphs than Mr. Obama’s single term. (Of note is the fact that Joe Biden has been serving in the Senate for longer than both Messrs. Obama and McCain combined.) But when does being the senior Senator from Delaware or a junior Senator from Illinois or a Senator who seems to have been around forever from Arizona affect one’s ability to serve as the President of the United States? To my thinking, it doesn’t.

Once in office, a politician doesn’t magically acquire new opinions or new factual knowledge. In the Senate, one of the most cripplingly inefficient institutions in the United States government, neither Mr. Obama nor Mr. McCain have acquired the ability to make critical decisions under pressure. What, then, does a lengthy tenure in Congress give a politician, other than a proficiency at playing the reelection game?

Thus, I think it’s time for us to drop the charade of valuing “experience” and demand more from our political coverage. Experience is not a reasonable benchmark of a candidate, and all the news outlets who fawn over Senator McCain’s military and Congressional records are remiss in doing so. Let them instead discuss his policy positions, regardless of when he formed them; let them astound the American people with Barack Obama’s knowledge of constitutional law; let them celebrate Sarah Palin’s fight against corruption as governor of Alaska (home of notoriously clueless and recently indicted Senator Ted Stevens); and let them herald Joe Biden’s leadership of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. And most important of all, let the American people, for once, make an informed decision about who they are going to elect as the leader of the world’s most powerful nation.