Well, not always, but certainly sometimes. This brings up what I call the Obama/Sanders Exception – for a candidate who starts the campaign as a true underdog with no deep-pocketed backers, simply being able to organize a credible Presidential campaign while starting from scratch should count as relevant experience.
“Experience” is a code word for; Do you know who owns you now?, Will you folllow the Party line?, Are you a team player?, and more things along that line.
If not then you are a rebel, a wild card, an unknown quality and very dangerous.
Why don’t we just simply elect someone that has no experience and isn’t a public figure but also they just happen to be really good at whatever they do and also everyone likes them once they get to know them.
Experience is important, but a good inexperienced candidate is always preferable to a bad experienced one.
Also, too much experience can backfire. The person becomes so rigid and set in their ways, especially in the insider Beltway swamp ways, that they become totally out of touch with the general commonfolk.
I think @Miller is a really good Pit moderator and quite likable. Let’s start up a PAC!
I tend to agree. Ramping a campaign quickly and efficiently is a key skill for a candidate. It was one of the things that made me optimistic about Harris.
I really liked Obama, as a president and a person, but I had the sense that his slingshot to the top didn’t allow him to make the connections and build the network that he needed. It reminded me of how Carter’s outsider status helped get him elected, but didn’t leave him with any friends in the party. I was afraid this would be the case with Sanders too.
Michael Shaara’s 2066: Election Day, from 1956, is fascinatingly prescient in this.
People in the 1950s were noticing that jobs increasingly required testing to show qualifications. Shaara asked why, then, something as critical as public office had no such tests. Therefore, in this future, anyone could grow up to become President, because they would take a series of tests and the supercomputer SAM would pick the “best qualified” person.
Until 2066, when the world had become so complicated that nobody passed all the tests. The presidency had surpassed human limits. (A now forgotten context for the story is that current president Eisenhower, running for re-election, had had two major health crisis in two years and 12 years in office obviously killed Roosevelt.)
Rather than do the science fiction-y thing and make SAM president, Shaara comes up with a human solution. The story isn’t about supercomputers - it was a look at a present that had suddenly grown so huge it seemed beyond human capacity.
Is anyone in the world truly capable of being POTUS? Probably not. But the solution is not to throw darts at a list of names. It’s to reframe the question and truly think about the process.
You’re not wrong, but how do you propose to do that in a democratic society, when the average American reads at a 7th to 8th grade level (both median and mean!), and seems to be rather impaired at critical thought? I mean, the taller candidate seems to win more often than not, which is dismaying if we are hoping they’re choosing the better candidates through rational and objectifve means.
I’m not sure what the answer is. Part of me wonders if maybe there should be some kind of requriement beyond being alive, over 18, not a felon, and not mentally impaired enough to be able to fill out the voter registration card.
Clinton was Attorney General of Arkansas, and served around ten years as Governor. Quite a bit of experience. Carter was state senator before Governor, which is not a 'small state" being 8th in population size. Obama served as State Senator before moving on to the US Senate, he had the least experience of about ten years.
The outlier is trump of course, but other than that, everyone had a least ten years of political experience- Governor, State senator, etc.
I agree, but the US Senate comes close
So, every other president had at least ten years of experience, so you conclusion is that experience doesnt matter due to one guy?
It does clearly indicate that the current US public does not consider political experience an absolute prereq. The evidence is that it seems to be somewhere down in the lower reaches of the “nice to have” category. If there are enough other “positive” features, with celebrity seemingly being the foremost.
It really doesn’t matter at all what the 1825, or 1925, or even 2005 electorate thought about presidential candidate experience. What matters is what the 2024, 2026, and 2028 electorates think.
In all matters of politics it’s tempting to look back into history far enough to get a statistically interesting sample size. But that contains the implicit assumption that whatever question one is investigating has remained essentially the same over that time. Which is a huge uncontrolled and often unnoticed bias in one’s data.
Amen. The world before social media and smartphones is unrecognizable to ours today; especially in politics. Any data from before 2010 is noise. George H Bush’s path to the presidency isn’t relevant today.
Even the presidential elections since 2010 were unique, it’s dangerous to extrapolate anything from them:
- 2024: One candidate dropped out mid-race.
- 2020: Global pandemic
- 2016: First (mainstream) female candidate
- 2012: First African-American candidate (albeit for reelection)
It does- other than trump. No one was elected without at least ten years of good expereince.
Why do you count state senator experience, but not private sector executive experience?
Political experience is different. I was a city commissioner, and on a few BoD and even a “C” level position. Politics is just run different. In the private sector, they care about the shareholders first, then maybe the customers. In politics you have to consider all the voters, making the meeting and etc way way different.
As said, they are different; Trump being a living example as to the problem. Trump is what private sector experience gets you; absolute selfishness, no concern for the future, contempt for humanity, entitlement and corruption, psychopathic narcissism, an inability to work with others or negotiation without bullying. A company is effectively a for-profit dictatorship, and is a poor model for a government. Unless you are looking for a kleptocrat.
I’m not DrDeth, but IMO, private sector executive experience – with no political experience – doesn’t seem to map well to success in political office. A lot of voters like the claim of “I’ll run the government like a business,” but government’s services and requirements are very different from a private sector organization.
Here in Illinois, in 2014, a Republican, Bruce Rauner, was elected governor. Rauner had been successful in private equity and venture capital, but had no actual experience in any form of government or politics before being elected. His term was marked by extensive stand-offs between himself and the state senate, leading to Illinois not having a budget, at all, for a year (with resulting crises in various state-run services). The state government was paralyzed under his leadership, he became very unpopular, and when he ran for re-election in 2018, he lost badly to JB Pritzker.
On the other hand, while Pritzker was also a successful business executive, in addition, he had been involved in politics for years: he worked on the staffs of several U.S. Congressmen in the '80s, was active in the Illinois Democratic Party, ran for a seat in the House of Representatives, and co-chaired Hilary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign.
I made that point about public vs. private experience as well. While private experience doesn’t automatically imply success as president, neither does state senator. Sure you get experience running a local campaign and working as part of a Congress, but there is a lot of machinery in place to help and support you. Your decisions are part of an existing framework.
I really like Obama. I think he has the emotional IQ and intelligence to be successful at whatever he does, but his resume wasn’t what got him elected.
I completely agree. Being in charge of an enterprise where everyone is aligned on making a profit does not prepare one for public service where you have to build a consensus to get anything done.
My objection was to the assertion that previous presidents, except for Trump, had 10 years of public service thus proving that voters want experienced candidates.
I think most voters choose the candidates they like based on intangibles and then consider other factors, like their resume.
The focuses on public service v. private enterprise are entirely different. Public service is intended to be just that: Serving the public and protecting their welfare. Business focuses on protecting the interests of shareholders and eliminating regulation. The goals of these two approaches are often in complete opposition.
I think experience counts for a lot and is frequently underestimated as an important factor for a candidate. Joe Biden would have struggled even more than he did to get as much done as fast as he did – and it was a lot and very fast, compared to how long it would have taken someone else – as he frantically tried to right as many Trump fuck-ups as he could in his too-short 4 years*. His many years in the Senate gave him the knowledge to finesse legislation through Congress that another president might not have managed to do.
That said, if a candidate can’t get the public’s attention due to a lack of charisma, then all the experience in the world is meaningless (Gore, Kerry, Hillary Clinton). Obama was a unicorn. There won’t be another of his ilk in my lifetime, that’s certain. If that’s the bar, we’ll struggle to find another such a one.
I think the most important characteristics of a successful president are 1) decency; and 2) dedication to public service. I don’t want any more charismatic shysters. I do, however, want someone who can win.
*Unfortunately, 4 years is never enough. Republicans will relentlessly viper any Democrat who prevails in the presidency, as they always have, so they can win again in the next cycle. It almost always works.
Look at how successful candidates from the private sector were before Trump.
Remember Ross Perot? 19% of the vote the first time he ran, less than half that when he tried it a second time.
Mitt Romney? Sure, he was a governor, but the title that stuck was “hedge fund manager.”
Pete DuPont? He was also a governor, but the veery name reeked of capitalism. Ran on a platform of privatizing damn near everything and dropped out after finishing next to last in the New Hampshire primary.
Wendell Wilkie? A split in the conservative wing of Republicans helped him get the Presidential nomination. Famously mocked as “a simple, barefoot Wall Street lawyer”, he failed to attract support among blue-collar workers and was soundly defeated by Franklin Roosevelt.
Herbert Hoover? A great business leader. A great American. A terrible President.
Warren Harding? One term as Senator, but otherwise a businessman. Elected President, his name is synonymous with “corruption.”
So far, at least, Trump is the exception to the rule.