James Fallows, watching CNN early this morning, heard the following not once but twice from Clinton:
Sen. McCain has a lifetime of experience, I have a lifetime of experience, Sen. Obama has one speech in 2002
I'm too angry to write about this, so I'll outsource to him:
By what logic, exactly, does a member of the Democratic party include the "Sen. McCain has a lifetime of experience" part of that sentence?
...I have reached the point of wanting to scream every time I hear about the primacy of "experience," knowing how skillfully the 46-year old Bill Clinton waved that argument away when it was used against him 16 years ago by a sitting President who simply dwarfed him in high-level experience.* But to pose it in a form that is poison for the party should Obama be the nominee??? To produce a clip that the McCain campaign could run unedited every single day of a campaign against Obama? That is something special. (Also, I think she means 2004 for the speech.) If Bill Clinton poisoned the well for other possible Democratic nominees in quite the same way back in 1992, I can't think of it now....I mean, it's almost incredible to think about, when you consider what constitutes an "experience" edge in this election. The elder George Bush, by the time he ran for re-election, had been president for four years; vice president for eight; ambassador to the UN for two years; de facto ambassador to China for two; Congressman for four; director of the CIA for one year; plus former head of the Republican National Comittee, decorated combat pilot, and commander in chief during one brief hot war and the end of the prolonged Cold War. Moreover, in his "3 a.m." moments of real crisis, he had used his experience to make sane decisions:handling the collapse of the Soviet empire, standing up against Saddam Hussein, putting together a wartime coalition so broad and supportive that the United States may have actually made money on the Gulf War, then having the sense not to occupy Iraq. Not bad!
Nonetheless, the young, vigorous, though vastly less experienced governor of Arkansas was a better match for America's needs in 1992 -- or so Bill Clinton argued, and I believed. To hear, 16 years later, the Clinton team stress the transcendent importance of a "lifetime of experience" must drive the elder George Bush mad.
My wife is upstairs right now on a call with one of her clients. We live in a loft, and although her office is on the second floor, there are no walls between us. Now I myself worked in the Internet Services world for nearly a decade, and for the last year and a half I've listened as she's taken call after call from important clients. But could I put that on my resume? And more to the point, how badly would I be laughed out of an interview if I tired to claim that experience - her experience and expertise - as my own? And yet for some reason, a large percentage of Americans are willing to buy that argument from Hillary.
She didn't have top secret clearance when she was in the White House. She was not part of the President's daily security briefings. When the phone rang at 3am, not only was she not the one who answered it, it would have been insane for her to even try.
The first Bush was a supremely experienced man - next to Herrbert Hoover, perhaps the best prepared president we've ever had. And yet we chose Bill Clinton over him. And Herbert Hoover? Hopefully I don't need to explain to you why his experience didn't actually help once he got in the White House.
It isn't experience that matter, it is judgement. Think of it this way: if you were hiring a new employee, which would you rather have - someone who had a long resume but who fairly consistently made the wrong decision at crucial moments in their career, or someone who had a shorter resume but had an impressive knack for saying and doing the right things at the right times? If you are anything like me, my guess is that it wouldn't even be close.
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