I agree! He ran a brilliant campaign, managed near perfectly. As per the OP, his experience on working with the public on the labor side of the coin…not the operational side, the hand on experience and then went on to join the legislature on a state level then a national level. He’s a damn hard worker and he’s only in his late 40’s.
I’m looking forward to a dynamic president! Not one that’s going to look like a wooden puppet.
Nixon had more experience than Kennedy, but I thought Carter served one four year term as governor of Georgia, and then four years as POTUS. Reagan served two terms as governor of California. So, eight years apiece. Of course, counting POTUS experience as unique unto itself, then Carter had more experience, but being governor of California is a hell of a lot more like being POTUS than being governor of Georgia.
Oh, probably true. Dole ran against a draft-dodger and lost; Bush ran against a war hero and won. If McCain were the callow newbie and Obama a war hero, no doubt seasoned courage would be the sine qua non of Presidential leadership.
Of course it is equally difficult to nominate one guy in part because he was a war hero, and then turn around and claim that courage doesn’t matter four years later. If it doesn’t count that Clinton was a draft-dodger when he ran against two genuine war heroes like Bush Sr. and Dole, then it shouldn’t matter if Bush served in the National Guard and Kerry got shot in the ass with a piece of rice when he was in Viet Nam. If you see what I am saying.
Now maybe in all those instances there were other factors that outweighed a relative lack of experience in one area or another. That’s a perfectly legitimate position to take. Indeed, that goes back to what I said earlier about Carter and Reagan. Sure, Carter had more experience as POTUS than Reagan did. But the American electorate looked at what Carter’s experience showed about him, even in the White House, and went for someone else. Then four years later, made a similar comparison between a sitting President and someone with four years of experience as VP - and went for experience by the largest electoral margin in history. Did they do it based on military experience? Hell no - the Dems could have run Alvin fucking York against Reagan and still got blown away.
And who knows? Maybe come 2012, people will be saying “I didn’t think Obama had it in him, but he sure seems to know his stuff” and re-elect him. Or possibly the same thing, but with “McCain” instead of Obama.
Or, possibly, “What the hell were we thinking when we elected this clown?”
Regards,
Shodan
Let’s also not make the mistake of thinking that his experience as a Community Organizer was just some high school equivalent to being a team captain or something. It was a detailed, complex organization that addressed many of the same issues (though clearly not all) that any government executive (Mayor, Governor, even President) has to tackle in their responsibilities.
The work he did in this capacity is “Executive experience.” And it’s Executive experience in a government related field, even if he didn’t hold the title of Governor or wasn’t elected to that position. To discount this as irrelevant is missing a huge chunk of what has made him so successful in this campaign, and what will make him successful as President.
I agree. And I didn’t hold it against Bush that he arranged for cushy stateside service which he allegedly performed in full, because I didn’t care when Clinton did the same. Same with the drug use (Clinton: marajuana; Bush: cocaine). I figured, hey, base your judgement on the action, not on the party affiliation.
It should have been a warning to us all that Clinton was evasive about his drug use (“I used drugs, but technically didn’t inhale”) and Bush was secretive (“I swear I was in the military, never mind that all of the relevant documents were mysteriously shredded in chronological order”).
Using that as a barometer, I’d rather elect Obama (“yes we can”) than McCain (“I can’t remember what my position is on that”). That’s a warning to us all too.
Careful. They’ll accuse you of ageism.
This election will be fraught with ageism - but it will be the media perpetuating it.
It seems to me this debate has never been about “executive experience.” It’s all about “character issues.”
The fact is that McCain has shown tremendous physical and emotional courage in his career. The fact is that Obama has shown an ability to inspire people both on a personal and national level.
But George H.W. Bush also showed tremendous physical and emotional courage in his wartime service, and Bill Clinton was a creep. And if “executive experience” really is a prerequisite for the presidency, Ross Perot should have beaten them both handily.
When it comes to executive experience, neither candidate has ever met a payroll, negotiated with a union, marketed a product (other than themselves), cut the workforce to help balance the books or been called on to do any of the other functions we define as “executive.”
If you want to argue about something tangible, try discussing their voting records and platforms. If you want to argue about their moral character, don’t try to define it as “experience.”
Well that’s just plain, flat out wrong.
Both Senator Obama and Senator McCain have been meeting payrolls for nearly a year and a half now. And Barack Obama has shown extraordinary skill in staffing issues by everyone’s estimation.
And Senator Obama, has, indeed, negotiated with unions. What do you think those “police organizations” are that he worked with in enacting the Death Penalty reform he got passed as an Illinois Senator?
Who cares about marketing a product? What does that have to do with squat, let alone being President?
And if you had read the thread, you’d’ve seen where I posted how he’s just gotten the DNC to move their political operations to Chicago, in part to cut down on duplicate staffing needs.
I’m not certain if this particular example has been mentioned, but when war fever hit in 2001, there was quite a bit of talk that we were fortunate that the Bush administration collectively was absolutely the best foreign policy and military team one could dream of in a situation like this. Cheney was a former Secretary of Defense and White House Chief of Staff, with 5 terms in the Senate. Rumsfeld was a Navy aviator who was Sec. of Defense under McNamara as well has having served as ambassador to NATO, with 4 terms on the House. Colin Powell was former National Security Advisor and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. Paul Wolfowitz held a number of defense and policy posts.
And these knuckleheads with all their glowing experience brought us the Iraq quagmire. The main reason I reluctantly supported the invasion in the beginning was that I felt this “dream team” could handle the mission, that they could manage a knucklehead like Bush, and that collectively their intelligence was good and they would not mismanage it. Needless to say, all our hopes on these issues went down in flames.
In fairness, I do have to say that the situation may be repeating itself. As we know, Bush had little experience other than being governor and managing a baseball team. But repeatedly we were pitched the tantalizing prospect of the “CEO president”, a non-expert who could lead by delegation. Needless to say, this did not pan out. Bush’s own incompetence led him to directly mismanage what to him seemed simple enough to handle on his own.
Certainly Obama will be sold as “the delegator” much as Bush was. But will he make an ill-advised metamorphosis into “the deciderer” as Bush did? Only time will tell, though I will say Obama does appear smart enough to learn from his predecessor’s mistakes.
I’d like to think Senator Obama is smart enough not to make the mistakes Bush made. I expect Obama is smart enough to make a higher class of more-educated mistake.
On a mistake grandiosity scale, Bush made mistakes that we all said, “Jeez, even I’m not that dumb!” Bush probably broke half the rules in the “when I am an evil overlord” list.
Just a nitpick: Bush owned a baseball team, an enterprise at which even poor decision making skills result in profitability (and adequate skills result obscene profit). The skills required are simple
- locate checkbook
2)write checks - hand them to appropriate people.
With skill #3, you have much expert advice, and with 1 and 2, he could probably have found some experts, too.
Now, if he had managed a baseball team, he’d have a won-lost record and I’m going out on a limb here, but I suspect it wouldn’t have been very good. Managing a baseball team requires knowledge and vision, two of the larger gaps in his abilities.
As a former Air Force officer, let me please extinguish the notion that McCain’s service as an aviator correlates to anything beyond his ability to lead other pilots. Aviators are members of an exclusive fraternity with insular customs and norms, and after fifteen years rising through the ranks, they are so accustomed to the pilot culture that any other unit is a shock. I’ve seen four or five colonels with wings who had plenty of “experience” and couldn’t lead a non-pilot to the restroom; I’ve also seen plenty of good leaders who had never flown a plane in their life.
I have run into pilots who are leaders, but I never noticed that leadership tended to be any more common among them than among any other kind of officer. McCain served a single command tour after he got back from Vietnam and then moved to the Office for Legislative Affairs. He also declined a promotion to Rear Admiral, where his limited executive experience would certainly have been tested.
To be clear, I do count this as executive experience. Leading a flying squadron is like being the CEO of a small charter airline that happens to be armed to the teeth.
If you were to create a resume for your ideal president, what would it look like? You can ask a hundred people and they’d have roughly a hundred different resumes. The job of the office of the President of the United States is like no other job. Sure, a background in law is nice, but I don’t feel that it’s everything.
I’m completely fine with Obama’s “lack of experience”.
Right, and I made it clear when pointing it out that it was relevant to consider, but only to a point.
And as I alluded before, we see in George W. Bush how well the concept of a “CEO president” worked in practice. A fighter squadron is sort of small potatoes in the CEO analogy, anyway.
Sen. McCain’s experience as a POW and victim of torture led him to publicly denounce the practice. His experience as a trailing candidate led him to reverse that position for political gain. His experience in government lead him to oppose the Bush tax cuts. His desire to woe wealthy campaign doners lead him to reverse that stand. His first hand experience with perils of accepting large campaign donations (Keating-5 scandal) lead him to hold campaign finance reform as the centerpiece of his 2000 presidential bid, and to sponsor the reform law that bears his and Sen. Feingold’s names. His desperation for campaign funding in 2008 lead him to illegally (or at least unethically) utilize public funds as loan collateral, violating in spirit, if not in letter, the very law he wrote.
Sen. Obama’s experience with repealing IL state fuel taxes in order to aid stressed consumers led him to see the folly in a similar proposal made during the primary campaign. A position he stood by even though unpopular with the electorate and probably detrimental to his campaign.
I concede that Sen. McCain has far more experience than Sen. Obama. I maintain that the current state of Sen. McCain’s character has laid waste to whatever good that experience might do for this country. If the John McCain of 2000 were running against Sen. Obama, I might well require a coin toss prior to casting my vote. These last 8 years in the Senate have broken his integrity as surely as his Vietnamese captors broke his resistance all those years ago.
Shodan, you appear to have changed your tune about the need to evaluate a candidate’s level of so-called executive experience. You said:
Then there was this exchange with Lightnin’:
I believe I have demonstrated this very thing. The qualification of “executive experience,” defined as governorship, statesmanship, and/or an officer’s commission, seems to have no bearing on whether a President is considered good or bad.
Would you care to address this, please?
Would a fighter pilot typically consider a move to a political office a plus, or would this be a position to get him away from command? How much influence would his father’s position have had?
I’m having a hard time thinking that a fighter pilot would consider a post involving buttering up Congressmen very exciting, but maybe it was for McCain.