Friction and Fiction

This election will be one for the books.

There has been a lot of swooning over the fact that the Democratic nominee, and quite possibly the next President, will be either black or a woman. I can only hope that this fact is representative of the progression of tolerance in our society as a whole. It is a remarkable achievement, not necessarily in itself, but because the precedent has historically been so different.

But there is another historical precedent which is being broken, one that has not been talked about much, and one that involves a certainty about the next President of the United States. He or she will have been a U.S. Senator, with no actual prior executive experience.

This has not happened often in the history of our country. The last President we elected who had not been either a governor or VP was John F. Kennedy. Neither had Eisenhower, but he was the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe for a year, after serving as a General in the war against fascism, so that qualifies as quite a bit of top-down experience in my book. Hoover had been the U.S. Secretary of Commerce, an executive position. Benjamin Harrison and James Garfield had only been in Congress before being elected as President, but both had been Generals.

So what does it mean that we are not going to elect someone with executive experience? First, let’s look at the field of candidates.

In the Democratic Party, there was really only Bill Richardson who could have had a serious shot. His record put those of the remaining Democrats to shame. He has been the Governor of New Mexico for more than five years. Before that he was the U.S. Secretary of Energy, the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, and a member of the U.S. House for fourteen years. This man had more governing experience than Clinton, Obama, and Edwards combined. Yet, voters rejected him.

On the Republican side, there were three viable candidates with executive experience. First, for eight years Rudy Giuliani was the mayor of a city with four times the population of the entire state of New Mexico. Mitt Romney was the governor of Massachusetts, a successful businessman, and — how could we forget – he apparently single-handedly ran the 2002 Winter Olympics. Mike Huckabee, while seemingly lacking in “meta-governing,” still has far more proven executive know-how than McCain.

It could be said that these candidates were weeded out because of the whole experience taboo when deciding who can bring change to Washington. But then why are two of the three remaining candidates running on their years of experience? Shouldn’t they have been weeded out, too? If we were to have simply discounted experience altogether, executive or other, then the two nominees would be Barack Obama and Tom Tancredo. I hope we all agree on how that would have played out.

But no. Clinton keeps reminding voters of her 35 years of experience (maybe she’s counting in dog years), and McCain has been in Washington for almost three straight decades. So this is clearly not an “experience in general” issue. Rather, by process of elimination, we are left with the notion that it must be an executive experience issue.

Now we face the possibility of a dangerous trend. Voters could be refusing to elect a governor because “that’s what we did last time, and look how that turned out.” The addiction to change seems to have bypassed the consideration of actual experience and shot straight to the former job titles of the candidates, like in a human resources committee meeting to see who will get a coveted promotion. Governor? Nope. Bush was a governor. Toss that resume.

Like I said, this type of thinking is dangerous. If we were to follow the logic, then no Texans, baseball tycoons, or 5K runners would be electable.

But I think it pervades more deeply than we know. Not that we are afraid of Texans (unless we inadvertently messed with Texas), but there might be a good reason for our emerging distrust of governors. Quite simply, they know what they’re doing when they come into office, and that makes it much easier to pull a fast one on the American people.

In his first term, George W. Bush brought with him an incredibly experienced, politically savvy team of advisers and officers. How often did we think to ourselves, “Well, even if the President can’t pronounce nuclear, at least he surrounded himself with brilliant people”? The genius of John Ashcroft, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, and company soaked into Washington like water in a sponge. But once there, no one could squeeze hard enough to get it out.

Upon Bush’s reelection, a massive shakeup occurred. Oh good, we thought, a change of scenery can only make things better. But really, it just expanded the sponge. The minions filled the bureaucracy and expanded outward. The only one we trusted, the general, the Secretary of State, the only one with an approval rating above 50% left on “difference of opinion.” Rumsfeld stayed a little while longer, but at least we got a new Attorney General, right?

The scary thing about the current administration is the orchestration that brings about every move — as if every move the people could make to question the policies (whether good or bad), has been preconceived and accounted for. If water boarding is really as important to our national security as those at the top seem to not say it is, then maybe they should state their case plainly and clearly, instead of declining to classify it as torture.

What seems to worry voters about governors is the idea that governors know how to pull strings. They don’t have to be the one on the stage, and they don’t even have to be in the same building. But somewhere is an intricate system of pulleys and levers that only an executively experienced person can operate.

And so, this election, we have discounted anyone in possession of the pocket manual for that machine.

With a Senator, we feel reassured. Not that legislators are immune to the potential of corruption or the call of greater power. But they don’t already have a perfect battle plan in place, and so any attempts to go down that road of self-service will be far more transparent in the eyes of the American people.

Still, it is reckless to make generalizations and assumptions. I still believe that experience in itself should not be perceived as a negative, as I said in my post in January. But I feel I have refined my position a bit to allow for outliers, and even the gentle hand of history. We may yet be surprised by whom we elect.

For example, we can look at the President with probably the least amount of political experience, executive or not, before taking over the Presidency. He had served only two years in the U.S. House, representing the seventh district of Illinois. But in the White House, he reshaped the Republican Party, freed many hundreds of thousands of enslaved Americans, and kept the nation together against the will of millions. This political newcomer was Abraham Lincoln.