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.

Hubris, Experience’s Last Lesson

Time magazine had a recent story about the experience issue in this election cycle and whether Obama had enough or not. The magazine provided a chart showing the experience of all the previous presidents and what kind of experience they had prior to taking office, specifically: public service, congress, or military. I would link to it but Time did not include it the same story online. It was one very informative chart. Amazingly, some of our best presidents had the least experience and some of our worse had the most. What does that tell us?

I saw a recent set of stories of the development of the internet and one theme that seemed to run through all the episodes was how companies lost out because they became big, dominate, and failed to notice changes in the market over which they had seemedly complete control. Microsoft did it to IBM and then nearly had it done to them when they fail to see the internet coming. Netscape was the browser everybody used and didn’t think they had to talk to Microsoft when they woke up and realized the importance of the internet. Who uses Netscape now?

Experience breeds arrogance which will lead to anyone's undoing. It is experience’s last lesson before someone with less experience takes over. And then the cycle begins again.

In the history of American policy, few have had as much experience as Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld and yet their hubris, the arrogance they displayed against any critic or detractor, the authority with which they dismissed the experts in the State Department, CIA, and anywhere else that knew they were wrong led to where we are today in Iraq and their reputation in that ol’ dustbin of history of the forgotten and ruined.

Perhaps someone with less experience is willing to listen to others that have more of it or at least others who have different opinions. Maybe that’s the best lesson experience can teach us: to not rely on experience too much. The best experience is to be open to new experience without prejudice or bias, to not let experience go to your head and make you forget how you gained that experience in the first place.

To some, experience leads to hubris, to others it leads a humility and openness to new experiences. Let us hope our experience will be the latter whoever is elected come November 4, 2008.

Experience is not what it used to be

This is not the season for experience. The Clinton’s, one of the most politically adroit couples to come along since maybe the Roosevelt’s, has been unable to overcome the change movement that is in the air. People want change. People want to be inspired by their candidate. People are tired of experience.

And who’s to blame them? When the current administration came into office, it was one of the most experience groups in governing that has taken over for some time – except of course for the President himself. And yet, these pros made the mistakes of amateurs. Lucky for them, the military was educated enough from its experience that it saved their ass – sort of.

So why shouldn’t experience take a beating? Throw the bums out and get all new bums. Even if they are new and don’t know quite what to do, we know from experience they can’t do much worse than someone with experience.

Woops! I’m evoking experience to degrade experience. Isn’t that a self-defining definition or self-fulfilling prophecy or just plain selfish?

One BIG difference in this election that’s way different than almost all that have come before is the election of a Senator to the presidency. The last time that happened was when John Kennedy got elected, and I don’t know when it happed before that. Experience has taught us that for senators to get to be president, they need to get themselves picked as a vice president first. While it's not unusual for senators to get their party's nomination, they don’t usually win presidental elections.

A very good route to the White House is to become a governor first. They do very well in presidential elections. Seems we are always picking outsiders. Seems change is not all that much change.

The very best way to become president is to be the commanding general in a major war. That strategy has worked from Washington to Eisenhower. Some things never change.

Which brings up another thing experience is famous for: The more things change, the more they stay the same. Does that mean that if Obama brings enough change to the government it will be the same as what we got now?

One of these days, these Obamaniacs are going to wake up with a big case of change-hangover. And experience teaches us they will become disillusioned and cynical about their government and politics. They will turn away from it and return to sports or celebrity-watching or American Idle/Idol, and experience politicos will move back in and run thing just as they always have.

Experience will do that to you.