Does experience count? [View All]

[sniffa]

Attention Bill Clinton: If that's what this election is about, it's already over. No matter how much Hillary Clinton, McCain or Rudy Giuliani brag about being tested and vetted, it's not experience that will be decisive in determining the next president.

For many, McCain's long record of experience may be a liability even greater than his party-bucking moderation on immigration and his bear hug of President George W Bush on Iraq. What his resume mainly does is remind a youth-obsessed culture of his age. When Gallup asked voters in August to rate traits as desirable or not in the next president, the "undesirable" percentages for being a member of a racial or ethnic minority group (13), a woman (14), a Mormon (22) or having "strained relationships" with one's children (45) all paled next to being age 70 or older (52). It's not morning in America for Reaganesque elders in the political arena anymore.

For Hillary Clinton, the failure of "experience" as a selling point was becoming apparent even as her husband continued to push it on Charlie Rose. A recent ABC News-Washington Post poll in Iowa found that she clobbers Obama on the question of who has the most experience — 49 per cent to eight per cent. But to little end. That same survey had Obama ahead by four points overall because, as this year's pervasive polling match-up has it, the electorate values change over experience.

snip

But for Hillary Clinton, the problem isn't just that the Bush years have tarnished the notion that experience is a positive indicator of future performance. She has further devalued that sales pitch with her own inflated claims of what her experience has been.

Ted Sorensen, the JFK speechwriter now in the Obama camp, saw the backlash coming in a recent conversation I had with him after Hillary Clinton had mocked Obama for counting his elementary-school years in Indonesia as an asset.

"Hillary should be careful about scoffing at other people's experience," Sorensen said. "It's not as if the process of osmosis gives her presidential qualities by physical proximity."

Whatever Clinton's experience as first lady or senator, what matters most in any case is not its sheer volume, that 35 years she keeps citing. It's what she did or did not learn along the way that counts. That's why one of the most revealing debate passages so far came in an exchange that earned much laughter but scant scrutiny this month in Des Moines.

http://www.khaleejtimes.com/DisplayArticleNew.asp?xfile=data/opinion/2008/January/opinion_January12.xml§ion=opinion&col=

yep, the experienced candidate.