Executive experience

I get the feeling that this Steven Warshawsky is a bit of a troll, so I feel a little iffy about even commenting on his article, but it's worth it I think just to bring up this issue of executive experience. Warshawsky believes that Obama cannot win the election, and that one of the reasons is because he's too inexperienced:

If elected president, Obama would be the fifth youngest president in U.S. history. The only younger presidents would be Teddy Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, Bill Clinton, and Ulysses S. Grant, all of whom were much more accomplished than Obama. Grant, Roosevelt, and Kennedy were war heroes. (Not Clinton, notoriously.) Roosevelt and Clinton had served as state governors. Grant had been the general-in-chief of the Union Army during the Civil War. The least experienced of the four, Kennedy, had served twelve years in Congress, six in the House of Representatives and six in the Senate, and had been a serious candidate for vice-president in 1956.

Well. Just because the five youngest presidents had more experience than Obama does not mean that all presidents have had more experience than Obama. There was an obscure president in the mid-nineteenth century whose only experience was a stint in the state legislature and a single term in the House, but he did alright.

Liar liar pantsuit on fire

In this day and age of internets and You Tubes, it's just getting harder and harder for politicians to get away with the sort of white-lie fibbing that Hillary Clinton indulged in with her harrowing account of her 1996 visit to Bosnia. She was initially called out by Sinbad (of all people), who had accompanied her on the trip and remembered it being a lot less dramatic. Unwisely, she decided to double-down on her version of events, resulting in this entertaining fact-check column in the Washington Post, and this entertaining You Tube (both via Andrew Sullivan):



The weirdest part about her version of events, I think, is that all this is supposedly happening with friggin' Sinbad right there in the scene, like a bad mid-90s buddy comedy. I mean, it's just absurd--and yet this is the sort of thing she cites as part of her "35 years of experience" that makes her "ready on Day One" to be commander-in-chief. And am I supposed to also accept the converse of her argument--that it is Obama's lack of this kind of experience that makes him unqualified to be commander-in-chief? Should Obama have spent more time tooling around in a C-130 with Sinbad and less time, oh, teaching Constitutional law, or doing community organizing?

Hillary Clinton would undoubtedly make a good President, but it would not be because of any executive experience she has supposedly racked up during her years as First Lady. She shouldn't have made this ridiculous "experience" claim at all--and yet somehow it ended up being the cornerstone of her whole campaign.