The modern Presidency is demanding. So demanding in fact, that a reasonable hypothesis is that no amount of prior experience prepares you for the job. As a corollary to that hypothesis, experience is not a good predictor of a successful Presidency. I'm emphasizing foreign policy because in the current race, that seems to be where this question emerges.
Let's look at post-Roosevelt Presidents and see (Roosevelt is excluded because while his Presidency was largely successful, he had the advantage of 4 terms, a good amount of on the job training as it were.
Truman--inexperienced, good. No one would have considered Truman qualified when he took office. And he faced enormous challenges. Got the big things right. Was re-elected.
Eisenhower--experienced, good. Again, got the big things right. His experience was unique, and may have in fact been a hindrance.
Kennedy--inexperienced, bad. Didn't really accomplish all that much, despite oodles of political capital and charisma. This might be debatable in both evaluations--8 years in the Senate, 6 in the House, and some might disagree he was all that bad, but let's move on. But again, few real accomplishments, and not much of a legislative track record.
Johnson--experienced, bad. Master of the Senate. Got civil rights through, everything else more or less a disaster.
Nixon--experienced, bad. Need I say more?
Ford--hard to say. Too short a term to really evaluate, experience was unique
Carter--inexperienced, bad. Again, no comment really necessary, I presume
Reagan--inexperienced, good. While being governor of CA is a big deal, he was not a Washington type, and had little real foreign policy experience, where he probably had his greatest triumph.
Bush I--experienced, bad. One termers are usually one termers for a reason
Clinton--inexperienced, good. In these hyperpartisan times, the evaluation might be controversial. Too bad, he wasn't great by any stretch of the imagination, but he didn't screw up on anything big either.
Bush II--inexperienced, bad. Ideology aside, he's done little right.
So, while it's clear that lack of experience isn't a good thing, experience might be a bad thing. Look at our Presidents who came into the office with lots of experience--3 of 4 were bad. Only Eisenhower worked out well, and his experience was unique anyway. If we dismiss Eisenhower's pre-Presidential experience, we have strong evidence that experience is a bad thing.
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4 comments:
a bit black and white in the good/bad evaluations, aren't we?
Nixon had some nice highlights like China diplomacy, Kennedy wasnt terrible with making the Ruskies blink in Cuba, heck even Carter had Camp David.
The point wasn't yet another evaluation of these Presidents, the point was to see how experience is associated with Presidential performance. The idea was to make a 2x2 table, 4 cells, and put Presidents in those cells. Adding more categories muddies the waters, especially given the limited number of cases available for analysis.
ahhhh...but faulty data creates faulty results
The data is good, I think, given the nature of the hypothesis. True, it's broad, but the number of cases doesn't permit a more refined analysis anyway. I suppose if someone wanted to publish the hypothesis, they'd do a series of case studies.
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