Presidential politics in America: is experience 'overrated'?

This is a column I wrote for the Flint Community Newspapers on Tuesday...

Elections, especially presidential ones, have a way of marking subtle changes in the attitudes of Americans with respect to politics.
Take, for instance, the issue that appears to be manifesting itself as the 500-pound gorilla in the polling station: experience.

(The relevance of experience in presidential politics was even explored in a cover story in Time Magazine this year.)

It's as if we've turned back the clock to 1960, when Richard Nixon, vice president and Republican nominee for president, made it a habit of accusing his opponent, John F. Kennedy, of being too inexperienced for the job.

The only difference, of course, is that Kennedy's relative lack of experience according to his rival would have compared him favorably to Franklin Roosevelt by today's standards.

Kennedy, who was only 43 years old when he narrowly defeated Nixon in the general election, had been a decorated sailor in the Navy during World War II before serving for nearly 14 years in the United States Congress--eight of those years in the United States Senate.

In the past, when American voters were charged with the responsibility of choosing the most qualified person to hold this highest office, experience trumped nearly all considerations.

These days, a presidential candidate boasting but a poor reflection of Kennedy's resume would be overqualified.

Andrew Cohen, a professor of journalism and international affairs at Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario, wrote a fascinating op-ed in the Ottawa Citizen about the experience issue in the upcoming presidential election.

Cohen wrote:

In the past, when Americans expected presidents to have a record of political service, Mr. Obama would have been called a poseur or imposter and sent home. Not anymore. This is the day of the dilettante.

Experience is overrated. It is unnecessary. As someone recently put it, anyone can grow up to be president in America, but now you don't even have to grow up anymore.

This is a somewhat worrisome critique of the political climate in this country, and one that should not be dismissed because of its northern origin.

So, is experience truly "overrated"?

With only the present election cycle to guide me, the answer is surely in the affirmative.

Consider that since the aforementioned election of John F. Kennedy, American voters have not elected a sitting senator as president. (Nixon, for his part, was also a senator but gained experience as a vice president before being elected president in 1968.)

A coincidence? I doubt it.

This year, the two major political parties give voters no choice.

More troubling is the fact that the person dubbed by many in the mainstream media as least qualified to be on a presidential ticket, John McCain's recently-named running mate, Sarah Palin, is the only candidate on either ticket with executive experience--Palin has been governor of Alaska for less than two years.

Compare that to McCain and Joe Biden, Obama's pick for vice president, who have spent a combined 60 years in Washington as legislators and not in a corner office.

These men seek to lead the executive branch without any notable executive experience.

With respect to McCain's counterpart, Obama, experience, at least as an overarching qualification for president, has ostensibly been replaced by less tangible traits like "hope" and "vision."

Experience, for Obama, clearly isn't a winning issue.

The junior senator from Illinois served nearly eight years in the state senate before a sex scandal forced his Republican opponent in the 2004 race for U.S. senate, Jack Ryan, to withdrawal just months before the election. Obama then defeated Alan Keyes, a throw-in candidate with absolutely zero chance of winning, in a landslide.

And after less than one term's worth of experience in the U.S. senate, Obama won the nomination of the Democratic Party for president by the smallest of margins over the more experienced candidate, New York Senator Hillary Clinton.

All that being said, perhaps we will all come to find that these who aspire to lead this nation are as rich in other facets of their character as they are lean on experience.

"As I say, experience isn't enough," wrote Cohen, responding to an e-mail regarding his sentiments on experience. "Experience without judgment does not get you very far. I would say you have to have both, in equal measure, to be a good leader."

And so, in the final analysis, perhaps this election must boil down to judgment--who has it, and where did it come from?