A lot is being made of experience during this Presidential contest. McCain is the most experienced candidate, Clinton is more experienced than Obama, Obama is pretty green. I find all of this talk completely irrelevant. What experience do they have that makes them fit for being President? Clinton has, what, an extra term in the Senate? That is the extent of her elected experience. She was on the sidelines during Bill’s terms, but does that make her a more experienced candidate? Obama served in the Illinois Senate for 8 years before being elected to the US Senate. So, he has more years as an elected official than Clinton.

But, does it make any difference? Is there any correlation between success as a President and previous experience? And what kind of experience matters?

So, let’s see. Here is a list of all the US Presidents, as ranked, on average, by a number of scholarly lists. Unsurprisingly, the top 5 are Lincoln, FDR, Washington, Jefferson and Teddy Roosevelt. And here is a list of their previous executive experience and here is a list of their previous occupations. What do we see when we combine the two?

First, a couple of notes. The types of experience included are Senate, House, VP, cabinet secretary, governor, and general of the Army. I’m not quite sure cabinet secretary is all that relevant, but it is here. What isn’t included are ministers to foreign countries and state and municipal offices lower than governor (mostly because it would take too long to look those all up). And, any errors in the above table are a result of either errors on the Wikipedia pages or my copying of data (what other sources of error could there be?). FDR was also Assistant Secretary of the Navy, but I didn’t include that as it didn’t seem relevant. But, for completeness, I mention it here. Finally, I was going to have a total for years of experience, as I thought a plot of rank vs total years of experience would be interesting, but it didn’t seem like it would be easy to find out how many years Presidents served as Generals and how relevant that is anyways.

What can we learn? Well, looking at the three highest ranked Presidents, Lincoln had 2 years in the House, FDR had 4 years as governor of NY, and Washington had been General of the United Army of the Colonies, or essentially no experience in government. Lincoln is ranked so high because he presided over probably the most tumultuous time in US history and, had he performed poorly, the country likely would have split in two. Washington presided over the most precarious time in the country’s history: had he performed poorly, the US might have dissolved before it had even gotten started. And FDR was president during World War II. None of these men had much prior political experience, at least on the national level.

The bottom three? Harding was in the Senate for 6 years. Buchanan was in the House for 10 years, the Senate for 10 years, and was Secretary of State for 4 years. Finally, Pierce was in the House for 4 years and the Senate for 5 years. Each of these men definitely had more political experience at a national level than any of the top three before becoming President. It would seem that prior political experience is no great indicator of success as President.

Looking at the top 10 Presidents, 6 had less than 5 years of prior political experience, while only 2 had 10 or more years of prior experience. And the bottom 10? 2 had less than 5 years experience and 5 had 10 or more years.

It seems fairly safe to say that prior political experience is no guarantee of a good Presidency and lack of such experience is not an indicator of a poor President. I’m not saying that experience is meaningless. I’d rather have someone who has some experience to someone completely green (like me). But, I also think experience is overrated. I think the President’s personality and character are just as important — if not more so — than his (or her) experience. In fact, I think it likely that one of the best indicators of how successful a President was would be the people he surrounded himself with. If he had a diversity of opinions in his Cabinet, I’d guess he was likely a better President.

This is, incidentally, one of the biggest reasons, I believe, that Bush’s Presidency has become such a mess. He had people around him of like mind. The only dissenting voice was Powell, and we all know what happened to him. I also think that, with time, Bush’s position on this list will fall quite substantially.

So, I think that claims that McCain and Clinton are better choices for President because they have more experience is definitely not borne out by history. And, if anyone can turn the country around, it isn’t someone who has spent a lifetime in Washington. It is going to be someone with a fresh perspective. That, to me, points towards Obama.

Just some random political thoughts I had ruminating about in my head while driving home:

Will we ever have another good political debate? I mean in the spirit of the Lincoln-Douglas debates, when the two men ran for the US Senate. The debates these days are so watered down, so lifeless, so uninformative. They don’t really even qualify as debates. The candidates don’t present their view on some topic and then debate the merits of their opponent. They get stock questions for which they have uninspiring answers. I don’t imagine we will ever have a series of debates worth recalling in US History class, worth just referring to as the Obama-Clinton debates or the McCain-Huckabee debates. That eloquence is gone, replaced with the 30 second sound bite. I think our political process has lost something with them.

Why is Clinton attracting the blue-collar vote? I read today that Clinton is attracting more of the blue-collar democratic vote. I have to admit that I am perplexed by this. I’m not entirely sure why, but I feel like Clinton comes across as more of an upper class or elitist person. That Obama is more “regular guy”. This might be just because I don’t know enough about Obama, but Clinton has money (she just loaned her campaign $5 million), she has connections to the party (she is essentially part of the party establishment), and she just comes across as having more airs. So, I’m not sure what about her would attract that blue-collar vote. Lisa speculated that maybe they remember the good Clinton years and she is a symbol of that. That was my first though too, that she is somehow comfortable for that block. But, really, it doesn’t make sense to me.

The next president, either democrat or republican, is essentially screwed. I don’t see how he or she can have a successful presidency. Spending has to be gotten under control; there is no way the next president can spend at the same rate Bush has been spending. That means one of two things: higher taxes or cuts in lots of programs. Either would be very unpopular. Then there is the war. What to do there? If a democrat cuts and runs, and the situation goes to hell in a hand-basket, the republicans will say “We told you so.” If a republican “stays the coarse” and things don’t get any better, the democrats will say “We told you so.” There is no obvious solution and it isn’t clear that anything we can do will make the situation better. If I didn’t know better, I would have thought Bush and Rove planned this from the beginning: screw up the country so bad that a democrat is almost guaranteed to win, but is stuck with such a bad situation that there is no way they can fix it. It almost invariably will get worse. With the short attention span of the voting public, the democrats will be blamed for all the failings, and the republicans will be back in power for quite a while. But, I don’t think they are that smart. I just don’t see how the next president can really do a great job with the baggage and burden he or she will have to deal with.