What The Hell Is Experience Anyway?
By Justin Gardner | Related entries in 2008 Election, PollsWhen asked to pick between voting for “experience” or “change”, 3 out of 4 voters want change.
However, that’s not the whole story from Gallup:
The results of this forced-choice question were lopsided in favor of “change” — 73% of Democrats said changing the system would be more important to their decision about whom to support, while only 26% opted for “experience.”A separate question in the poll, on the other hand, suggests that it may not be a matter of “either/or.” When asked how desirable or undesirable certain characteristics would be for the next president to have, an overwhelming 96% of Democrats say it would be desirable to have a candidate who “would bring about change in Washington” as the next chief executive.
Well sure. If you ask people if they want their superhero to have the power to fly and super strength, the answer is going to be obvious. But they don’t necessarily get to pick somebody like that…or do they? I’ll talk about Obama’s supposed lack of experience in a moment.
Some more numbers…
But a majority of Democrats, 59%, still think “a lot of experience in Washington” is a desirable characteristic, while only 11% say it is undesirable and 29% say it doesn’t matter either way.
Okay, so Political Wire says this doesn’t work to Obama’s advantage because of the “experience” gap between him and Hillary, but again I’ll ask “How much more exprience does Hillary have?” Okay, she was First Lady for 8 years…so what? She’s only been a Senator for 6.
Brendan Nyhan has the numbers…
Clinton — six years in the United States Senate;
Edwards — six years in the United States Senate;
Obama — seven years in the Illinois state senate and two years in the United States Senate.
So when Hillary talks about experience, I think we really know what she’s talking about: having Bill Clinton in her back pocket. Because apart from being a political wife for numerous years, she has no substantive legislative experience.
And let’s be honest, could she have gotten elected in New York if she was just some lawyer? No. Hillary is who she is because of Bill, and if that’s the “experience” she’s leveraging it’s ridiculous, transparent and voters are going to eventually see through it.
In fact, I bet you Obama and his camp are counting on just that, as they have already starting talking about how all Hillary really has in the way of experience is being inside the halls of power, knowing how Washington works and little else.
In the end, I think this is why people end up electing governors…
This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 4th, 2007 and is filed under 2008 Election, Polls. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
September 4th, 2007 at 6:22 pm
“Okay, so Political Wire says this doesn’t work to Obama’s advantage because of the “experience†gap between him and Hillary, but again I’ll ask “How much more exprience does Hillary have?†Okay, she was First Lady for 8 years…so what? She’s only been a Senator for 6.”
Last night on PBS’s Charlie Rose Ted Sorensen–a speech writer for JFK
said that: ‘JFK faced similar criticisms during his presidential bid, he was only 43 years old at the time, the youngest candidate to run for office at the time. Barack Obama is 45. JFK’s relatively short political career representing the state of Massachusetts as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from 1947 to 1953 and in the U.S. Senate from 1953 until his inauguration in 1961. Barack Obama on the other hand has far more time under his belt than Kennedy did.’ So these questions about whether Obama is experienced enough, old enough, whether the country is “ready” for a black president are baseless.
These are the same types of questions we now scoff at when we think back to Kennedy’s bid for the White House,
“are we ready for a Catholic president?” How asininely impertinent are these types of questions? To assume that a 43 year old man has less wisdom that a 47 year old man is just moronic.
These sort of attention diverting questions waste our precious time, time that could be asking the real questions that face our country, instead candidates find themselves embroiled in tit-for-tat name calling instead of addressing the real questions real Americans want answered. I don’t know if this is a conspiracy on the part of the politicians in order to avoid the tough questions or whether Americans on the whole think this sort of “entertainment” nightly atmosphere reveals the best candidate for the job.
Quite frankly, I have yet to hear any of these “actor” candidates address the core problems facing our country, they rather quip a few quippy remarks to appeal to the mass “informed” idiots out there watching–as if the presidency is akin to a vote for your favorite American Idol contestant.
September 6th, 2007 at 8:10 am
[...] it’s this intellectually dishonest “experience gap” nonsense. That’s why I pointed out a couple days ago that the experience gap between Hillary and Obama was a myth because Obama has been a legislator a [...]