DOES EXPERIENCE MATTER IN ELECTING A PRESIDENT?

If Americans really want a chief executive whose experience and leadership have been clearly demonstrated, we should abandon the constitutional separation of powers and adopt parliamentary government. Parliamentary party leaders who become prime ministers generally have exercised party leadership for a number of years before acquiring the power to govern.

The American system is very unlikely to choose leaders with comparable experience. In fact, national experience has proven to be more of a liability than an asset. Governors have been elected far more frequently than congressional leaders. The last twelve presidential elections are instructive: In three, a present or former governor defeated an incumbent president. In four, the losing candidate was a Senator; in three more the loser was a former Senator now serving as Vice President, and in still another a former Senator who had previously served as Vice President. In only one of the past twelve elections has the losing candidate not served in national office.

In the most remote of these elections, 1960, Senator John Kennedy was elected against Vice President and former Senator Richard Nixon, and it was only the second time in American history that a sitting Senator was elected President. It is an understatement to state that neither was a party leader. Kennedy, seriously but secretly ailing, had no real Senate record. The first Senator ever directly elected as president was Warren Harding in 1920, a nonentity utterly without power or influence in Congress. Ironically, when a desperate Republican Party nominated Senate majority leader Robert Dole in 1996, he resigned from the Senate in order to run, and went on to suffer a staggering defeat.

When the Republicans had the opportunity in 1952 to choose a national leader so identified with party ideals that Senator Robert Taft was affectionately dubbed “Mr. Republican,” it chose instead to nominate General Dwight Eisenhower, whose party affiliation was unknown to the public until shortly before his selection. The Democrats passed by their incumbent vice president, Alben Barkley, Senate leader Robert Russell, and well-known Senator Estes Kefauver to choose little-known Governor Adlai Stevenson. When the Republicans did choose nationally-known Senator Barry Goldwater in 1964, he suffered the worst defeat of any presidential candidate in the party’s history.

The most successful candidates in the recent past have been unemployed politicians (Nixon, Carter, Reagan), a vice president best known at the time for being “out of the loop” on the Iran-Contra crisis (Bush I), the governor of a very poor state (Clinton) and the governor of a state which has the constitutionally least powerful governor (Bush II). There were national leaders in all of those elections who would have come to the presidency with impressive experience. They were not chosen.

Clearly, neither much-experienced maverick Senator McCain, less experienced Senator Clinton nor little experienced Senator Obama is a Senate leader. A half-dozen or more members of the Senate in both parties have earned leadership roles, but none will be their party’s nominee. (Connecticut Senator Chris Dodd, who sought to be the Democratic candidate, is an example.)

What does experience tell us about a future president? The truth is that experience doesn’t tell us much about how the next president will exercise legislative leadership, share or usurp power, perceive and promote America’s place in the world, and respond to unanticipated events. In 1933, Franklin Delano Roosevelt took office without any clear idea of how he would cope with the deepening economic depression. What he did was begin a “hundred days” of frantic activity to provide short-term relief for the jobless and minimally regulate business. (In fact, the long-term effects of the National Industrial Recovery Act and the Agricultural Adjustment Act were to concentrate industry and agriculture, not to make them more competitive.) For years (until the beginning of World War II in Europe), FDR’s policies did not reverse the Depression, but they did revive hope. They came to represent the beginning of the very modest American not-quite-welfare state. Most recently, Texas Governor George W. Bush’s bipartisan cooperation with Democratic state legislators was an experience later contradicted by his presidency.
In 2008, John McCain’s candidacy of staying the course in Iran is, whether he wishes it or not, a reaffirmation of the Bush presidency: Respice. Hillary Clinton’s candidacy of thirty-five years of experience, whether she wishes it or not, a revival of the New Democratic liberalism of her husband’s presidency: Adspice. Barack Obama’s candidacy of articulating rarely expressed hope, is – and he wishes it to be – a platform of promise: Prospice. As of this date, this may be an election, like FDR’s in 1932 and Kennedy’s in 1960, in which hope wins. It succeeded politically and psychologically in Roosevelt’s presidency and was aborted in Kennedy’s (although it survived in the JFK legend). As has been often true in the past, promises may not be fulfilled, but it now appears likely that most voters will find the alternatives to be much more unpromising.