Saturday, April 05, 2008

Experiencing Experience

I was commenting over at the NYTimes on an opinion by Republican Minority Leader Boehner, and I couldn’t stay on task. I kept getting back to my current theme on experience. Here’s what I wrote which I’ve fleshed out a bit more since then:

Has Boehner pulled a boner or what?

This election is like no other - or not like another in a long time:

1. We will elect a senator one way or another. A senator has not been elected president since JFK, and I don’t know who it was before that. Most senators have to become vice-president before they get to be president. This year is an exception.

2. Whoever loses will still be around in the Senate. Microphones sucks, they will be the goto person for spin on the winning senator/president’s performance.

Back to Boehner’s boner. Hello! There’s a very unpopular war going on right now. A war brought on by what? Come on everybody, you know the answer! Two of the most experienced politicians to hold office in a very, very, very long time: Cheney and Rumsfeld. So much for the importance of experience.


I could see how their experience with the CIA of totally blowng it and not warning of the fall of Communism and Saddam's invasion of Kuwait would lead them to reject anything they hear from the spooks. But even a clock that is not running tells the correct time twice a day. They just happen to pick a time to reject intelligence that was right.

Democrats – we are told – are experienced at getting us into welfare spending, bleeding-heart causes, and programs that are that four letter word in liberalism, fair. Republicans are supposed to be experienced at running things, like a successful business. Fairness be damned, the return on investment and the bottom line are what measures how any enterprise is run. And what has this republican administration run us into with the almost absolute power they had at their beginning? We don’t need expertise in obtaining failure.

Oh, and while we are on experience. The person with the least experience in the administration was Bush. Maybe if we had someone in the role of president who had something higher on his agenda than outdoing his brother or showing he’s not the wimp his dad is, we wouldn’t be in this mess we are in now. That’s where we needed the experience. If only Bush had listen to Colin Powell. The Decider decided to listen to the wrong people. Hello Hillary! Here’s the point about experience you should be making.

I’m damned sure no ones going to walk into the White House the morning after that 3:00am call and tell McCain what he should do. And I don’t think that will happen to Hillary either – especially from Bill. No, any mess McCain or Hillary get us into will be of their own making. (Fairness note: I refer to Hillary by first name to differentiate her by name from her very powerful husband and not by gender from her opponent.)

The Clintons will put their lock on control of the Democratic Party if they return to the White House. If experience teaches us anything, it has taught us that. No wonder Kennedy, Kerry, Carter, and any other big dogs in the party are either out right supporting or leaning toward Obama. Political history says Gore should support Obama because they are fellow populist, but then Hillary considers herself just as much if not a more experience populist – at least that’s what her machine keeps pumping out – than either Gore or Obama, so he could display loyalty and stay with the Clinton camp.

So we sit and wait to see which way Gore goes. Will Super Al wait with us and support whoever gets the nomination, or will he move in and display the leadership the party needs to make a smooth transition to the general election? Stay tuned.

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