While I was eagerly awaiting a presidential contest between Mike Huckabee and Barack Obama, the capricious voters of New Hampshire just had to disrupt my pleasant fantasy. For the first time in decades, the party conventions might actually choose candidates this year.
One issue that comes up in both parties is experience. By that token, the Democrats should have flocked to Bill Richardson. He’s been a congressman, an ambassador, a Cabinet secretary and a governor. Instead, he had trouble finishing ahead of Dennis Kucinich and dropped out.
No Republican has anything like Richardson’s resume. John McCain has been a prisoner of war and a senator. Huckabee has been a governor, as has Mitt Romney, who also boasts considerable success in the private sector. Fred Thompson has been a senator and an actor. Rudy Giuliani has been a prosecutor and a mayor.
Does experience matter? Or, to put it another way, can experience predict the course of a presidency?
There isn’t space enough here to consider all our presidents, so I’ll stick to the four on Mount Rushmore: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln.
Washington got our fledgling republic off to a pretty good start. He had executive experience, as the commanding general during the Revolutionary War. That involved a fair amount of politicking, as he had to persuade the Continental Congress to supply and pay his army. He had also served in the Virginia House of Burgesses and as chairman of the Constitutional Convention.
Washington was about as experienced as anyone could be for a job that had not existed before. But since he was twice elected without opposition, it’s impossible to compare his experience to that of an opponent’s.
That’s not true for Thomas Jefferson, who lost to John Adams in 1796 but defeated him in 1800. Jefferson’s “executive experience” consisted of two years as governor of Virginia during the Revolutionary War, and he performed so dismally that he was never again elected to office in Virginia. He had served in the Continental Congress, as an ambassador and as secretary of state.
But Adams had similar experience; he had also served two terms as vice president, and by 1800, a term as president. Obviously, he was the more experienced candidate in both elections. Yet Jefferson was the better president.
Theodore Roosevelt was only 42 when he became president. But he had been a governor, an assistant Cabinet secretary and state legislator, as well as a noted historian and naturalist. Few presidents have ever been as experienced in as many different endeavors. He was by far the more experienced presidential candidate in 1904. T.R. was certainly an effective president even though, as one critic charged, he had “no more use for the Constitution than a tomcat has for a marriage license.”
Before he became president, Abraham Lincoln’s political experience consisted of one term in Congress, a failed effort at a U.S. Senate seat, and four terms in the state legislature. He was easily the least qualified of his Republican rivals for the 1860 nomination, and the least experienced candidate in the general election.
And yet most historians rank him as one of the greatest, if not the greatest, of American presidents.
So two of the presidents on Mount Rushmore were the more experienced, and two weren’t. It doesn’t appear to be a decisive factor. This leaves us with the question of what does matter: Character? Eloquence? Sincerity? Chutzpah?
Ed Quillen (ed@cozine.com) is a freelance writer, history buff, and publisher of Colorado Central Magazine in Salida.
