Interesting article on Why Obama may actually have more relevant experience than McCain. (Why state-level legislators actually do more work, and spend more time learning about the issues, than US Senators.)
The author doesn’t state that he thinks Obama has more experience, just that his 8 years of experience as a state legislator should not be ignored.
It’s all hype, this claim that any experience makes one prominent person better qualified to be President than some other prominent person.
Prominence, whether gained in public office, or in other activities, is what does matter.
Voters are given a choice between many equally prominent persons.
Hence, the far more qualified (ie experienced) nominee usually has no advantage to offer the public over any of the other prominent persons who are nominees.
Al Gore, for example, was far more qualified by experience than the Bush who allegedly beat him (if you believe the falsified election returns of 2000). Did the voters care that the Bush was relatively inexperienced — that the gap in experience between Gore-Bush was vastly greater than the gap in experience between McCain-Obama? Not enough, apparently. The GoP faithful only mention experience as a dodge, as a way of not debating the issues at all.
Is General Wesley Clark 100% correct in saying that being a fighter pilot who was shot down and imprisoned for 5 to 6 years is not much of a qualification for being President? Yes, of course, he is absolutely right. And, contrary to what Obama says, General Clark is not “inartful” in saying that — he’s just articulating a truth about that kind of experience: it adds nothing special to the resume. After all, millions of fighters for freedom, both soldiers and anti-war-protesters, have had the same experience — of being shot down, imprisoned, and brutalized while in the custody of the (enemy) State. The act of “standing up to fight for freedom” is far too minimalistic to be a distinguishing criterion, as a critical fulfillment of any sort of “qualification” for the Office of President.
Of course, that does not stop the GoP in their lying distortions, of hyperventilated over-blown rhetoric, of shooting down anyone who dares to speak of such facts by a standard of truthfulness and reason. When has a small matter like the truth or reason ever mattered to the GoP? What counts, to them, is spin — the inebriation of ideology.
If any of you have taken a course in Political Science, especially one concentrated upon the American Presidency, you quickly learn one truth — one principle: there is no known way to prepare any man or any woman, adequately, to be President of the United States — not, at least, for the modern Presidency — the virtual dictatorship that the Presidency has become under the Bush-Cheney doctrine of a constitutionally unlimited executive — a doctrine which the spineless Democrats of the Congress and the other Quislings of the GoP continue to endorse, by the actual legislation that they support and pass, such as the recent FISA and the vast on-going war budget they recently enacted.
No man, no woman is prepared by experience to be a dictator. Saddam quite honestly said he studied, intensely, the methods of Joe Stalin, to learn how to be a dictator. But, whom do American Presidential wanna-bes study — or do they just make it up as they go, like the Bush does?
The Constitution, my friends, was never intended to establish a virtual dictatorship, like the modern American Presidency. It was meant to establish, rather absolutely, legislative supremacy — a tyranny of the majority, but only if and when a majority could be coalesced between the House and the Senate, where popular power (the House) joined political power (then residing mostly in the States). Any such coalitional majority would, so the Framers hoped, be so broadly-based as to be both truly national and truly necessary. Otherwise, no power of any kind was to be exercised by the Federal Government — and certainly not those vast invasions of personal (popular) liberty and of state sovereignty that are so often and commonly practiced by the occupants of the modern Presidency, such as FISA or even no-child-left-behind.
The greatest crisis facing the American Republic, this year, and for many years both recent and yet to come, remains this: how do we restore to the Office of the Presidency the humility that George Washington amply had, which the occupants of that Office itself were always supposed to have?
The critical qualification — in short — for the Office is just this: humility, extreme humility. The present process of selecting nominees, by their sheer prominence, by their ego-driven narcissism and its associated willingness to become even more and ever more prominent, is a perversion, an evil deviation from the plain intentions of the Constitution and of its Founders.
Humility, my friends, does not require a man to proclaim, loudly and endlessly, that he knows what he certainly does not and never could know — for no man, no woman is ever qualified to be a dictator, a king or a modern President — and we should not accept any claims to such qualifications. Humility would lead us to see the grand beauty of democracy, the sense that led to that famed statement about the vast humility of George Washington, that he was only supremely only primus inter pares, first among his equals, and thus rightly “first in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen.”
(And the great Lincoln, it was often noted, was at least an equal to Washington in his own humility.)
(For, when we are humble, we know the truth about ourselves, that we have much to be humble about!!!)
May God send America such humble persons to be its leaders!!!