Barack's Inexperience

A new column in Newsweek is trying to twist Barack's lack of experience into something different.

...here's something I bet you didn't know: If Obama becomes president, he will have spent more time serving as a state legislator (eight years) than anyone who has occupied the White House since Abraham Lincoln.

Is that because everyone elected president over the past 145 years has been lacking in experience, or because we don't view two terms in a local legislative body to be demonstrative of massive leadership abilities?

John McCain has been a member of the U.S. Senate since 1986; do I really mean to suggest that Obama's eight years in the Illinois Senate (not the most august deliberative body, as anyone who has seen it will attest) provide the same preparation for the presidency? Well, not exactly.

What Alan Ehrenhalt does argue is that being in the U.S. Senate isn't the best experience for anything. No argument there. But my problem with the whole premise of this, and most arguments offered on the experience issue, is that people make their arguments based on political experience alone. When I argue that Barack doesn't have the experience for the job, it's not just his lack of political experience. It's an evaluation of his entire resume - there's just not much there.

During the years that Obama served in Springfield, 1997-2005, he was forced to wrestle with the minutiae of health-care policy, utility deregulation, transportation funding, school aid, and a host of other issues that are vitally important to America's coming years, but that U.S. senators are usually able to dispose of with a quick once-over. State legislators have to do this largely on their own, without ubiquitous staff guidance, because staffing is not lavish even in the more professional state capitols.

Whatever. Eight fidgety years in the state legislature, combined with a law degree but no law career of note, and a couple of years of community service, hardly shows a history of leadership. That's the real argument. John McCain's 22 years in the Senate isn't great by itself, although it does show his willingness to focus on one job for a long time. Barack has never been serious about a single job in his 'career'. But you add in McCain's military service, his U.S. Naval Academy training, and his two terms in Congress, and it blows Barack out of the water.

As for the fall campaign, I am not urging anyone to vote for Obama, or against McCain, on the issue of experience. What I am suggesting is that experience itself is a slippery commodity to measure—that there is no easy way to guess what sort of political career is ideal for a president—and that we would all be better off just listening to what the candidates say and how they say it, and spending a little time looking into what sort of people they are.

Listening to what they say only takes you so far since presidential candidates say whatever they have to in order to win election. But when you look into Barack's past associations to determine what sort of person he is, that, of course, is when voting for Barack becomes impossible.