So Obama has been an elected official since 1997 while HRC has

[WCGreen]

been in office since 2001...

Yet Obama supporters claim he is not a career politician even though he has spent more than half his working career as a politician...

I guess Obama's state Senate gig hardly counts as political experience toward a career in politics when people start throwing out that yes, Virginia, Obama is a career politician...

But when some claim he has little experience, Obama supporters quickly point to his years in the State Senate...

Well, which is it...

In all fairness to the career politician claim thrown at HRC, well it sticks...

She probably could have made a great career as a corporate attorney for one of the Wall Street law firms and lived a comfortable life as a power broker behind the seen...

At least Obama went back to his roots to share his talent with those less fortunate...

I guess I am getting too cynical lately...

Everyone running for president on the democratic side is a career politicans...

They all have records and experience....

It's just different...

Even my guy, even though he only served six years in the Senate but he has been running for president since 2005, is a career politician...

Ah well, when you come right down to it, the last guy who ran for president that was a true non career politician was Ross the P...

But he reminds me of that movie Peggy Sue Got Married, you know where it seemed plausible at the beginning but then spiraled right into La La land toward the end of her journey back in time...

[Kurt_and_Hunter]

1. Nobody in the last 100 years or so has run for President citing his experience as a state legislator

It's an embarrassment to even talk about it, let alone brag about it.

[WCGreen]

2. Unless you're an Obama supporter....

I don't know...

It's just the way things are going that makes me sigh...

[Kurt_and_Hunter]

10. I agree with your general point which is that everyone running for President is a career politician

But I don't view that as a negative, for that job. Governance requires a host of specialized skills and expertise, and a rather creepy approach. What kind of psycho goes around telling people he or she will save the world?

As the saying goes, anyone who seriously thinks he should be President is psychologically disqualified for the job.

I dislike the slippery traits of politicians, but they are probably necessary traits to even begin to govern a country where 30% of people despise another 30% of people, and the rest are out to lunch. (If I were President I would be honest and principled, and we would have a Civil War within about a month.)

If this stuff was easy more folks would do better at it!

[ClarkUSA]

14. Except Edwards, who's a one-term senator

:shrug:

[WCGreen]

15. If you followed all the way down to the Ross Perot comment I made...

I value experience...

I have seen far too many candidates implode once they were elected simply because they couldn't handle the politics od serving in office...

Paul Hackett, although never an elected official, comes to mind when I think of people who don't have the political skills to serve as effective elected official...

[Herman Munster]

3. it's kind of like someone wanting to be president

after serving on the school board or county commission.

Laughable really.

[babylonsister]

5. And the voice of change, and a United States Senator,

you clueless, lyin' person. State the facts, and just the facts. We get enough spin from many other sources.

[Kurt_and_Hunter]

16. Sorry, I didn't realize "the voice of change" is now a resume item.

[babylonsister]

21. You are of course, right. How about BG's post? Will you respond to that?

#19 on this thread?

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=132x3875848#3875924

[killbotfactory]

8. Yeah, Chicago is full of lightwieght politicians

:eyes:

[ClarkUSA]

12. Nixing Lincoln? Nobody in U.S. history has run for President citing her experience as a First Lady

Now that's an embarrassment, considering the only time Hillary played at being co-president, she went down in flames.

[ellisonz]

26. Hillarycare? DOA.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan: "anyone who thinks can work in the real world as presently written isn't living in it."

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,980052,00.html

[killbotfactory]

29. Has Hillary ever explained what she thinks went wrong, back in 94?

It would be nice to know what she learned from the experience.

[ellisonz]

32. Kind of, not really, maybe.

Mrs. Clinton's supporters say voters have forgotten the gory details of the last Clinton health plan, which proposed huge new bureaucracies and new mandates on employers, and assumed that one-seventh of the American economy could be reinvented over the objections of powerful groups like the insurance and pharmaceutical industries.

Rather, her allies say, voters remember her for having tried to change the system.

Mrs. Clinton is quick to admit errors and thereby distance herself from the old plan. "I think that both the process and the plan were flawed," she said in the interview. "We were trying to do something that was very hard to do, and we made a lot of mistakes."

----

The woman who was sharply criticized a decade ago for a lack of political realism is now steeped in it. If her cardinal sin in 1993-94 was overestimating the public's appetite for change, as many analysts contend, she seems intent on not repeating the error. When employers complain to her about the need for federal action on health care, she said, "I say back to them, 'Fine, what are you going to do to help us create the consensus that has to develop in order to move the political system?' "

----

She also continues to shy from the ultimate challenge: describing what a comprehensive Democratic health care plan would look like. When pressed, for example, on how to control costs, usually the thorniest issue, she replied: "It depends on what kind of system you're devising. And that's still not at all clear to me, what the body politic will bear."

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/10/washington/10hillary.html?_r=1&ei=5070&en=b3e5eae2515beefd&ex=1181361600&pagewanted=print&oref=slogin

I think she understands to an extent that she callously overreached and that there has to be a different approach. However, I'm not sure she's particularly determined to get the best plan possible or how to do so, rather she hides behind her "scars" and makes broad outlines without considering how to get the best plan possible.

Consider: http://robertreich.blogspot.com/2007/12/why-is-hrc-stooping-so-low.html

Another unfunded mandate is the last thing the American people need.

[ClarkUSA]

33. Exactly... but don't expect Hillaryworlders to ever admit their girl fucked up healthcare reform

Gee, between that and IWR and Kyl-Lieberman... that's "experience" alright -- the lousy kind Americans want to avoid!

[maximusveritas]

4. This sounds like a strawman

I haven't heard too many people use that term for either of them. I did a Google search and could only find a handful of examples (most of which were random comments on blogs) and just as many that argued the opposite. So unless you're referring to a conversation you had here on DU, I'm not sure what you're talking about.

[WCGreen]

7. It was just in another thread tonight....

And beside that, I really don't have an axe to grind...

Really just pointing out how zealous some supporters can become when they worship a candidate...

FOR EVERY CANDIDATE, not just Obama and HRC...

And heaven forbid something is not true unless it shows up in a google search....

[babylonsister]

11. Link please. Thanks. nt

[WCGreen]

20. It was the thread about the foriegn policy people who are advising

Obama and HRC...

It was a tone I got from the comments on both sides of that argument that thread that got me to thinking about the career poltician stuff that has been always out there since Ross Perot first and Paul Hackett most recently burst on the scene...

If you notice that even though I support Edwards, I have not really mixed it up so to speak since I want to really save my ammo for the GOP...

It makes no sense to me to beat each other up on DU...

I take my fights elsewhere...

That's just me...

I was really just trying to make a point and tonight I used Obama as a starting point...

[MADem]

6. HRC was a Hill staffer/lawyer on the Watergate Commission.

That's government service, too, though it isn't elective office. And that was very IMPORTANT government service, as well.

Reagan was head of the Screen Actors Guild, a General Electric spokesman (GE, We Bring Good Wars to Life) and a shill for Twenty Mule Team Borax and the Wagon Train TV show, in addition to being a B actor, before he became CA governor, and later Prez.

Jimmy Carter was a Navy submarine officer, a peanut farmer, a governor, and then Prez.

Everyone brings something to the table.
I also think it is asinine to sit around "counting the days" like that shit matters.

Pick the candidate you like and vote for him or her. Picking apart candidates based on stupid shit is just a waste of time. Sometimes very experienced politicians, like Nixon, can suck. Other times those that are considered lightweights, fairly or unfairly (JFK) turn out to have world-changing charisma.

[WCGreen]

9. Jesus H. Christ...

I'm not counting days...

I'm just pointing out how supporters can see one thing for their candidate in two different ways...

[MADem]

13. Jesus H. Christ. I was AGREEING with you.

That's why I used the word ALSO in the sentence.

Whatever.

:eyes:

[WCGreen]

17. Sorry....

[MADem]

18. Never mind. Sometimes it's hard to get nuance from the written word.

And if people are beating up on you, sometimes it's easy to go into attack-to-defend mode.

But I was agreeing with ya!

[BeyondGeography]

19. Obama is a career public servant; it's the only thing he has ever cared about

And it was the three years he spent as a community organizer that made me comfortable with him from the start. Obama saw what programs worked and what didn't, why they failed (conception and implementation from the top-down rather as opposed to input and buy-in at the ground level). It also made him a good listener and honed his communication skills. People wonder what's different about Obama; it starts with the lessons learned in Chicago in the 1980s; if people are engaged and informed (in other words, don't bullshit them), good public policy outcomes are much more possible. He worked on modest things like jobs training, making sure the city delivered on services, getting asbestos removed from housing projects, but it taught him how to motivate people (or not) and when and where to compromise. He also had a front-row seat for the Harold Washington years in Chicago and saw the limits of the patronage model and symbolic, charisma-based politics.

People often sneer at this aspect of his resume, but these tend to be the same folks who routinely underestimate Obama. If you look at where he is today in Iowa and New Hampshire, how he has connected with voters, the type of energy and organization he has built on the ground, a lot of that comes from way back when. Whether that makes him a career politician or not really isn't relevant.

[WCGreen]

22. I know a lot of community organizers here in Cleveland who

all had great intentions from the start...

But when they jumped the line into politics, something changed...

This isn't to say that happened to Obama...

I didn't know him then so their is nothing I can gauge from...

It's just something I have culled from my experience with big city politics over the last few decades...

I like Obama, I really do...

I hope he is the real deal or what ever witty way his supporters in the media chime when they voice their support...

I would be more than happy to vote for him in the fall of 2008...

It's just that people have got to be realistic...

The messianic fervor that I see for Obama from some of his supporters is just a little unsettling to me...

HRC has hers as well...

But that, to me, is the politics of personality that can, and sometimes does, trump common sense...

I guess that is what can be expected in a party that can boast two historic, because they are realistic, candidates for president...

People's passions are running to their sleeves...

[BeyondGeography]

23. What makes him so formidable is that he does inspire people

but, underneath it all, there's a heavy lifter who knows what it takes to move public policy in a progressive direction.

It's a mistake to hold his charisma against him. If people believe him to be good based on the speeches and other surface judgments, that's fine as long as he is capable and not just selling them sweet nothings. The record suggests the right things on both counts.

[killbotfactory]

24. A charismatic progressive president is a problem I would like to have.

We can do worse.

[ellisonz]

27. Exactly.

Enough Pander Bears.

[WCGreen]

30. That seems to be the case...

[cali]

31. And Edwards has more than his fair share as well. In fact, even the

most mild criticism of Edwards will send quite a few of his supporters into a tail spin. All the candidates have overly zealous supporters. All of them.

[TheWraith]

25. So you conceed that Obama is a more experienced public servant than Clinton?

Or is First Lady still a political office?

[WCGreen]

28. I'm not concerned at all...

I think they are both great candidates...

By the way, I said public official...

There are no servants involved here...

That, to me, is a horrible turn of a word...

Public servant...