×
EXPERIENCE MATTERS. This warning from John Judis is, I think, an apt one for a Democratic Party that may be willing to trample its own better instincts to recapture power:
I wouldn't say that winning a presidential primary contest, or even the general election, is adequate preparation for being president. I'm skeptical about senators without significant foreign policy experience and governors from small states with little national experience or from large states who had little responsibility in office.John Kennedy was a two term senator, but he spent much of his two terms campaigning for president, and when he became president, made two very serious errors in foreign policy in his first year--sanctioning the Bay of Pigs invasion and appearing weak to Khrushchev in Vienna. Lyndon Johnson knew how to get domestic policy passed, but had little experience in foreign affairs, and it showed immediately in his decision to escalate the war in Vietnam. Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush made initial missteps in foreign and domestic policy.The presidents who didn't screw up immediately -- however their presidencies turned out -- were Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and George H. W. Bush. Eisenhower, Nixon, and Bush Sr. had extensive foreign policy experience, and Reagan was a two-term governor of the country's most important state, and had been involved in national politics for decades.Judis is responding specifically to the Barackobubble currently sweeping the nation, but his point has a more general relevance. It's not especially useful to lament our system's incentivizing of campaign skills over governing ability, but there's an actual downside to it as well: When you elect an inexperienced candidate who fumbles on essential issues, your party can be tarred with the association for decades to come. And given the current stakes in foreign policy, a fumble by a Democratic president, further embedding the impression that Democrats can't handle foreign policy, would be enduringly catastrophic. The question of who'll win the next election is critical, to be sure. But there's also a question of who will win the next three, four, and five. In other words, who will leave the party stronger than they found it, and that's an analysis depressingly few Democrats have been engaging in.
--Ezra Klein
