Obviously this dynamic has been discussed much this election cycle but I’d like to avoid discussing the current specifics and instead look at historical precedents.
Of past effective presidents (whether you’ve agreed with their policies or not) who was effective by virtue of past executive experience and who by their ability to oratorically inspire?
For example, I’d hold Reagan as an effective president (even though I did not love all his policies) and while he had executive experience my sense is that he was pretty absent as an executive. His effectiveness was in hiring good managers and in his ability to communicate his ideas to the people. Carter had good executive skills (as he’s shown since) but failed to inspire. Poor president. Bush1 good executive skills, moderate communication skills, fair president. Kennedy? Not alive long enough to know. So on. I’d conclude that an effective president hires good managers and advisors and excels based on his or ability to communicate his or her vision to the populus.
Inspiration counts for a hell of a lot. If you can make people feel good about themselves and optimistic about the country and what the future holds, you can accomplish a great deal, both materially and spiritually (spirit-lifting, that is). The two most inspirational presidents of my lifetime were JFK and Reagan. The country during their administrations are the times I look back on most fondly in regard to how things were going and what the future seemed to hold.
I agree also that a good inspirational leader is best served by having a superb coterie of advisors and managers to administer their administrations and carry out their plans. Both Reagan and Kennedy surrounded themselves with very intelligent, capable people to help them get things done.
And while we’re on the subject, I find myself drawn to and admiring Obama precisely because of his inspirational ability (though to be honest I wouldn’t vote for him because I disagree with Democrat philosophy). What concerns me about his possible presidency, however, is whether he would be able to assemble a cabinet and staff of sufficient quality. One has to move in certain circles, businesswise and politically, to adequately assess who would be the best man for each job and bring him onboard, and I fear that Obama at this point may well not have the connections necessary to assemble a truly top flight team. (My fear in this regard is further exacerbated by the team that another president with little real political experience, i.e., Jimmy Carter, brought to Washington.)
Now I’m not saying that Obama would be anywhere near as incapable as Carter in assembling his team (and most certainly not in terms of his likely job performance), but it does go to show that you need top-flight, quality people to assist you in getting things done once your inspirational ability gets the people behind you or else that inspirational ability will likely be short-lived and go for naught.
Well SA I was trying to keep the current out of this but since few are otherwise engaging … Obama actually has much of Bill Clinton’s former team signed up with him already. Arguably more of them then HRC does. The man networks well!
But to the point of the op? I think the best case is a highly effective and inspirational communicator with a positive vision for America’s future who is a good enough administrator to choose a highly qualified and intelligent team of managers and advisors who share his/her worldview. I really do not think that past executive experience factors into it.
I want an intelligent compromiser for President. I put inspirational ability and experience below both of those criteria, although it’s unlikely (in modern times, anyway) that you’d get to the nomimation without a modicum of both.
If the Presidential candidate is an intelligent compromiser, inspirational ability is more important than “executive experience,” particularly if we are speaking about experience in the political arena.
We are a diverse nation. We need someone bright enough to evaluate all the voices, create a reasonable compromise, and sell the compromise to the nation.
The criteria for President may be different, in my mind, than those for Congress or other positions that have a more narrowly-focused constituency. The President’s job is to listen to everyone and come up with a pathway toward improving our country. This is a different job than that of my local representative.
squeegee certainly that is a talent of a good executive, but is it a skill learned by past executive experience any more than by any other organizing experiences?
Dseid - Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a fabulous orator, he spoke with conviction and over the radio waves made the entire US believe he was as strong as an OX and as capable as a spartan - yet he was wheelchair bound.
Back then it was what was in your voice and what you could communicate over the air waves that is what made you likeable to the populace at large. If FDR sounded like a chipmonk he probably would not have been as effective as he was to getting the populace up and working toward rational means. It would have been different - luckily with him we had someone who was a good executive and a very good orator.
In this election we have a man [Obama] who is a fabulous orator yet we don’t know how well he will run the country, the more I read about him the more I feel my vote for him will be well cast. I believe he has what it takes to run the country and to pick people to stand by him that will do a very good job. He is already proving that. And Bradley Effect aside, I hope the people stay strong for him and vote against another Clinton Dynasty.
Carter had been governor of Georgia. So as much political experience as, say, Ronald Reagan or Bill Clinton. Whether or not a president chooses a good cabinet is, I think, personal to that president, and has little to do with the amount of political experience he’s had.
Of course he had. That’s where he got his nincompoops. And during the run-up to the '76 election I remember hearing (reading, actually) from certain Georgians that they hoped Carter wouldn’t get elected as he had screwed things up royally in Georgia - and assessment that unfortunately proved true on a national level once he got elected. Clinton, on the other hand, made his early appointments primarily, it seems, to fulfill racial and gender roles - not necessarily a good thing if the people selected aren’t up to the job, and I don’t feel he had the connections and/or experience to determine which ones would perform well.
Reagan, on the other had, had a wealth of experience - both executive and connections-wise - as the very successful and popular two time governor of a state that would otherwise qualify as the world’s eighth largest (IIRC) country.
This isn’t to say that I think the only road to the White House runs through large-state governorship. Long time congressional service, the vice-presidency, upper-level business, etc. can also produce qualified and capable candidates. It’s just that I’ve been concerned (and have been ever since Carter’s disastrous administration) about candidates with little upper-level and/or long term experience bringing enough qualified people with them to fulfill the promise that the candidate holds, and I believe this ability is particularly important when the candidate is charismatic and inspirational and otherwise truly capable of great leadership.
Hope that clears up the confusion.
ETA: My apologies again to the OP for posting as to the ‘currents’. I’ve been participating in several of these discussions and lost track of which thread I was in.
No, sorry, it doesn’t. It only highlights your partisanship. There was no qualitative difference between the pre-presidential experience of Carter and that of Reagan.
To the extent either of them selected their cabinets poorly (without getting into the substance of that debate) it wasn’t because of any significant difference in executive or leadership experience.
Apart from number of terms of office (one vs. two), years of experience as governor (four vs. eight), population of state governed (California is two or three times larger than Georgia) , economic significance of state governed (CA’s gross state product is currently almost $1.5 trillion vs. Georgia’s $379 billion), diversity of population, number of languages spoken by the populace, size of state government, etc.
I’d agree that Carter and Reagan did bring comparable experience to the White House. Their main political experience had been as governors and neither had worked in Washington. Both had some “real life” executive experience before entering politics (Carter had run a successful farming business and Reagan had run a major union). So the main difference between them in terms of their effectiveness was their personalities; Reagan was a great communicator and Carter was not.
Well, no, their respective experiences were not very comparable, which was the point of my and Starving Artist’s posts regarding the major differences between governing a backwater Southern state and governing California.
Being governor of a large and diverse state is much more like being President than being governor of a small and less significant state. In much the same way, being mayor of New York is more like leading the country than being a state senator for a half dozen years and then being halfway thru your first term as Senator.
Whether executive experience as governor of Mass. outweighs being married to Clinton is another question - you could sell it as experience in working with people you can’t trust, I suppose.
Sorry, but how do larger population, larger gross state product, or number of languages spoken in a state change, qualitatively, the job of being governor? The job still boils down to wrestling with the legislature to get things done. If anything, Carter’s job was more challenging, as he (successfully) took on the task of desegregating Georgia’s government against a tide of heavy legislative opposition.
Moreover, Carter had military and executive experience prior to entering government, and a degree in physics from the US Naval Academy (59th in a class of 820, with a difficult major). He had done post-graduate work in nuclear physics. Reagan had sometimes played a military man in movies, had led an actors’ union, and had a degree from Eureka College.
So, raw partisanship aside, Reagan could hardly claim a superior pre-presidential resume.
Let me see, Shodan, if I can guess which jobs count as experience for becoming president and which don’t. Keep score for me.
Governor of California: yes
Governor of Georgia: no
Mayor of New York: yes
Senator of New York: no
Governor of Massachusetts 2003-2007: yes
Governor of Massachusetts 1983-1991: no
Senator of Massachusetts: NO!!!
Senator from Arizona: yes
Senator from Illinois or South Carolina: no
Governor of Arkansas 1996-2007: yes
Governor of Arkansas 1983-1992: no
Senator from Tennessee 1994-2002: yes
Senator from Tennessee 1985–1993: no
Congressman from the Texas 14th congressional district: yes
Congressman from the Ohio 10th congressional district: no
Not particularly well - it’s not a simple matter of yes or no. It is who is more qualified than who. Governor of a small state is less qualification for POTUS than governor of a large one, because this is a large country and not a small one. Suppose I was looking for a CEO for a large corporation. Who is more likely to be qualified - someone who was CEO of another fairly large corporation, or someone who ran a corner grocery store for six months?
A Senator with twenty years of experience in the Senate may be better qualified than a governor of a small state. But he is likely to be better qualified than a Senator with, say, seven years, or even three and a half.
Because the challenges of running a large and diverse state with a large number of different industries are similar to running a large and diverse country with a large number of different industries.
If you were the mayor of Podunk, Iowa, where everyone is white, you are less likely to have any experience with, say, immigration or the issues with assimilating non-native English speakers into the community. Whereas for the mayor of New York it is practically second nature.
Do you really not understand the concept of “experience”? If so, that explains much of the support for Obama on the SDMB.
Of course, you could be playing dumb for rhetorical purposes.
Shodan, you’re overthinking this. Instead of having such a complicated system with so many different rules, some of which are mutually contradictory, why don’t you just make one simple rule: “the conservative candidate is always better”. You’d save a lot of time and you’ll find you always end up with the result you were going to get anyway.
Seriously, why is it that so many conservatives want to maintain the fiction that they’re independants? Why don’t they just say that they’re a conservative and plan on voting for conservative candidates? Instead they have to invoke a set of principles to explain how they chose their candidate without ever mentioning the c-word. And then in the next election they have to invent a new set of principles to match their new choice because their old principles no longer match the right candidate.
“Uhhh…you know how I said four years ago that it was unthinkable to vote for a candidate without military experience? Well, my views have matured since then and I now realize that military experience is overrated and you shouldn’t pick a candidate just because he has it. And remember how I said that it was important to choose a candidate who exhibits strong moral character in his personal life? Well, I now realize that a person’s private life has no bearing on their public life and we shouldn’t hold any unimportant marital problems against him. And that thing I used to say about needing people who aren’t locked into the beltway mindset? I now see it’s important for a candidate to have lots of hands-on experience in how Washington works.”
I think you’ve veered rather badly off course here, Nemo. The observation that a strongly conservative poster is virtually certain to vote for the conservative candidate is not really much of a revelation. The opposite holds, as well, and I have no doubt that most if not all of the strongly lib/Dem members of this board are going to vote for the Democrat or independent candidate rather than the conservative one.
The recent question though has been whether Obama, should he become elected, have the experience, knowledge and connections to be able to select and bring aboard his administration the type of people he would need to assist him in order to fulfill the promise that his inspirational personage and candidacy holds.
The two most inspirational presidents of my lifetime - Kennedy and Reagan - both brought with them people who could be (and in Kennedy’s case, often were) referred to as being ‘the best and the brightest’. I contrasted the staff and cabinet members of those two administrations with the people that Carter and Clinton - both having only small state governorship as their executive experience - either brought along or appointed and found them wanting.
In an effort to claim that Carter’s experience was the ‘qualitative’ equal to Reagan’s, you claimed (unless I’m badly misunderstanding you) that since both were state governors, there was no real difference in their experience and/or the circles they moved in…circles, btw, from which they would ultimately choose their aides.
It’s amusing that you accuse Shodan of blind partisanship when you make the sort of claims that you have Carter. To claim there is no ‘qualitative’ difference between the governorship of Georgia vs. California (as was eloquently laid out by Shodan above) is analogous to claiming there is no qualitative difference between piloting a Cessna four-seater and piloting a Boeing 747 as they both involve flying a plane through the air.
If you want to accuse someone of blind partisanship (particularly in support of one specific person - i.e., your allegiance to Carter) you should be pointing your finger right back at yourself.
Carter had been governor of Georgia. So as much political experience as, say, Ronald Reagan or Bill Clinton. Whether or not a president chooses a good cabinet is, I think, personal to that president, and has little to do with the amount of political experience he’s had.
And during the run-up to the '76 election I remember hearing (reading, actually) from certain Georgians that they hoped Carter wouldn’t get elected as he had screwed things up royally in Georgia - and assessment that unfortunately proved true on a national level once he got elected. Clinton, on the other hand, made his early appointments primarily, it seems, to fulfill racial and gender roles - not necessarily a good thing if the people selected aren’t up to the job, and I don’t feel he had the connections and/or experience to determine which ones would perform well.