How Much Stock Do you Put In HRCs First Lady Experience?

Great Debates
1

One of Hillary Clinton’s major debating points is her experience over Obama. Now it is obvious that she includes her time as First Lady and I think that is fair, although I think it is not a major thing I think it does count for something. But I just don’t see the experience gap as being all that large. First Lady, a couple of extra year’s in the Senate, what else? In fact, of course, Obama’s role in the Illinois Legislature should count for something and they have both worked in various public service ways much of their lives.

Hillary does that have the experience on the Armed Forces Committe, but I am not sure she has done a great job there, to be honest.

Is Hillary more experience and if so is it really a substantial difference between HRC and BHO? I am curious to hear both from Hillary and Obama supporters. Do Obama supporters concede the experience issue? is it a major reason for Clinton supporters backing her?

Disclaimer: I am an Obama supporter

2

I think Hillary has a great deal of experience…as a First Lady. This, of course, is meaningless when talking about being President. She talks up experience because she has nothing else going for her, and she hopes she can fool people.

3

I’m a supporter of neither, and am not even American, but the “Experience” issue strikes me as being of dubious value in measuring a candidate’s worth in this particular case, for four reasons:

  1. Unless I am very badly mistaken, neither Obama nor Clinton (or McCain, for that matter) has ever been the President of the United States. None of them actually have any experience in this particular job, and so any “experience” they bring to the table is only peripherally related. There is no lateral equivalent to this job you could possibly hold and still be eligible for this one.

  2. The experience that would be MOST related, if not quite the same, would be as the governor of a state or Vice President. None of the candidates have held such a role.

  3. If you’re going to count any sort of job as “Experience” then logically you would always have to support the older candidate, since the older candidate will always have more experience, unless s/he was unemployed for a long time and people who’re unemployed for a long time don’t get this close to being President. Clinton, by default, has more experience in general than Obama does simply because she’s been an adult for longer. But given that neither candidate has any experience as a head of state or government, I question whether 15 extra years of being a lawyer or a First Lady really has a great deal of bearing on the issue.

  4. You would be very hard pressed indeed to show that there’s a correlation between any particular kind of “experience” and success as a President. Republican-leaning posters like to point out that McCain has considerable military experience, but there’s little evidence being a soldier leads to being a good President; Grant was a magnificent soldier and a bad President. Similarly, there’s not a great deal of evidence that more years as a legislator leads to better success as a President. Should this be mistaken for Obama support I’d also point out that there’s no obvious negative correlation, either.

In short, what I think is that, when you get right down to it, there isn’t any experience in the world that approaches the job of President of the United States.

My guess is that the job of President is heavily dependent upon the times and the needs of the country at the time, and the character of the President will determine how well s/he deals with those needs. It is entirely possible that Grant would have made an excellent President in 1920, or that Lincoln would have been a mediocre one in 1844. I think it’s even conceivable that George W. Bush might have made a better President had he been born ten years later and ended up running for his first term in 2012. If I may go outside the USA for a great example, Winston Churchill was involved in one disaster after another for much of his legislative career… but when WWII broke out, it became quickly apparent that he was the man for the job at that time and place.

4

I think HRC’s First Lady experience counts for a little, but part of what it counts for is disadvantageous. Many voters are very ready for change, and Hillary is very much a Washington insider. She spent a skosh over half the last 15 years in the White House. How fresh and revolutionary is that going to make her? Also, IIRC the only substantial initiative that she really owned was the health care thing that was a disaster.

I really do think a person can absorb things about the job their spouse holds, especially if the job is extremely demanding and especially in this case where First Spouse actually does play frequent if minor rolls (entertaining and visiting heads of state, for instance).

But she’s trying hard to have it both ways. She learned a lot about being President by being First Lady, but she wasn’t really in favor of NAFTA. She will be the agent of change, but she’s already spent 8 years in the White House. She has experience with handling crises, but the War vote doesn’t count. She’s the one running for President, not Bill. But if you leave the volume turned down, it’s pretty hard to tell the difference.

And she has never answered That Phone at 3:00 in the morning.

5

Educate a non-American here, but isn’t being the First Lady essentially a full time job in itself? So sure she’ll have learned the social side, but have only vicarious experience of the ‘business’ side (not quite sure of the correct term here).

6

She knows where the closets and bathrooms are.

7

I bet that if she had ever done it, there would be a picture of her sitting in at a Cabinet meeting. I’ve never seen one. I’ll grant her that she’s met lots of people, but not as an equal and not in negotiations or private discussions. How much did Bill confide in her back then? I don’t remember it ever coming up.

ETA: Old timers will remember the fuss when Jimmy Carter asked Amy about nuclear (oops, newklear) policy. That doesn’t make Amy qualified to run for President.

8

No stock at all. She hasn’t been a Senator all that long either. Being married to a president counts for nothing.

9

looks at belly-button

retrieves belly-button lint

holds it out between my fingers

Oh about this much…

MeanJoe

10

Zilch, zero, nitz, bubkes…

11

Truth is she is on a first name basis with many people we will never meet. She has advantages . Are they significant?. Yes ,but I do not know if they are a big deal but they are a definite advantage.
She is a Senator. That is experience.

12

The ballyhooed “experience” thing is not relevant to the Obama-Clinton contest, in my opinion. Unless you count “experience in knuckling under to George W. Bush”, in which case Hillary comes out ahead.

I’m not a big fan of Maureen Dowd, but I enjoyed this from her column yesterday:

*"On a conference call Friday with Hillary’s ever-more-hysterical male strategists, Slate’s John Dickerson asked exactly when she had been tested in a foreign policy crisis. After a silence long enough to knit a sweater in, as the Web site The Hotline put it, Mark Penn cited “her work on the Armed Services Committee.” * :smiley:

13

The stock I put in her experience is the stock she earned by pissing off most of Congress by bullying her way into trying to get legislation passed that she was in no position to even discuss. Worse than thinking it’s meaningless, I think her First Lady experience adds up to a big, fat negative.

14

I am an Obama supporter who is, to a certain degree, willing to concede the experience issue. Basically, I would argue that it is hard to know how much experience she got by having her spouse be President without knowing how engaged she was with what he was doing. However, given their similar backgrounds and interests…and the fact that she did work on one particular aspect of his policy (health care), my guess is that she was pretty engaged and was thus likely to have picked up some experience.

As an example, if I look at my girlfriend and ask to what extent she has gotten the experience doing my job as a physicist osmotically through going out with me, I would have to say close to zero. However, this is for a number of reasons: Because she has a very different background than me, I don’t share with her much about the details of work…To the extent I do tell her things, they are very abstracted and have more to do with the interactions with other people than the calculations themselves. Furthermore, my job is very much a 9-to-5 job and so my work life and home life do not intermix very much.

However, if things were very different, e.g., my girlfriend had a substantial physics background and she had to attend a lot of functions related to my job, such as technical talks that I gave and I could even ask her for help on technical problems I ran into with my research, then in fact, I think she could gain quite a bit of experience through me even if it still would be different from firsthand experience.

My guess is that Hillary’s case is much closer to my second example and therefore that she has probably gained at least some, maybe even a fair bit, of useful experience for the Presidency by being First Lady for 8 years.

However, in the end, I don’t really know if experience is all that important in being a good President. After all, we have a Vice President (who has been, in many regards, probably almost a co-President) who touted his experience (both in government, particularly in foreign and defense policy, and in a leadership position of being a CEO of a major corporation) but who is atrociously bad because of extremely bad judgement and ideological blindness.

I find Obama’s arguments that vision and good judgement are probably more important than experience (at least beyond a minimum level of experience that, e.g., anyone in national public policy would get) to be pretty compelling.

15

Hillary’s first lady experience is probably not COMPLETELY meaningless. She probably has a lot of the same people to draw support and knowledge from that Bill had, where Obama might not have as solid a supporting cast in the beginning. Also, having Bill as a personal source of experience and wisdom to draw from is probably more of a benefit than a detriment.

16

I put not stock in her so experience as first lady of either the US or Arkansas. If I was Obama I’d dig up film of Bill campaigning against Bush I in 1992 rebutting Bush’s claims that Bill had no experience.

17

They always say “behind every great man is a woman…” blah, blah, blah. Most of the time it isn’t true. You can substitute any woman, or any spouse of either gender for that matter, to throw cocktail parties and be active in the local PTA.

I always thought Bill and Hillary were much closer as equals, and she wasn’t sitting around making up guest’s lists while he did the “real” work. She was right there as the country was being run. Of course she knows how to run it. She was there.

18

Truth be told, they both have some experience, Hillary perhaps slightly more. I will also, in good conscience, be able to vote for whichever of the two gets the nomination. However, when she keeps bringing up the experience she got in the following, I just want to grab her and jerk a knot in her behind.

  1. In the White House: Being First Lady has always been largely a social position, although Hillary did change how the title was perceived and was very active on the political scene and in behind-the-scenes advisory roles. That is not the same as being president by any fantasy stretch.

  2. Universal Health Care: Hillary, as First Lady, when you were handed carte blanche, everything you needed, a hand-picked committee at a time when UHC was in the national forefront, you completely blew it. Your inexperience then, your refusal to listen to those who knew better and your need for secrecy pretty much guaranteed what would be a complete failure – not partially, not we-nearly-did-it, utter failure. It might make sense if you would talk about what you learned from that as a failure, but you won’t even do that.

  3. Senate Experience: Yes, you have a record of getting a couple of minor things done while Senator. However, anybody with a brain cell has to know, since you only ran for the Senate on your way to trying to become President, your self-lauded cooperation was skillfully designed to facilitate this. I don’t for a moment believe that it how you truly are as a politician.

  4. Legal Experience: Haven’t many presidents been lawyers. Experience in the law can help you, but history has shown it is no gurantee that you will be any better or any worse than anyone else by having been one. Obama went to law school too.

Obama has plenty of faults too as a politician but this thread is about Hillary.

19

Updating the “experience” angle, Hillary Clinton had some interesting self-deprecating comments yesterday:

“Granted, I am a little older and I have earned every wrinkle on my face and I feel just as energized about what we are doing,” Clinton told a crowd of supporters on Monday in Austin"

http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalradar/2008/03/clinton-i-have.html

Wonder how all those “wrinkles” came about? Late nights in the Strategy Room with Bill, solving the world’s problems? We might know more if the Clintons would care to release some of those Presidential papers they’re carefully keeping under wraps.

20

I’d give her 1/2 x (Diddly + Squat). Not on the cabinet, no security clearance. Her two areas of influence were nomination of the Attorney General (remember Zoe Baird?) and the Hillarycare Health Plan. Neither was a rousing success.