Posted by tallman at 1:53am Oct 14 '08What makes you a viable experienced candidate for the U.S. presidency?
Unfortunately, the only thing that makes you a "viable experienced candidate" is to have already served one term as President.
We can talk about governing and public service and all that, and it certainly contributes, but in the end, the only real way to tell if someone would be a good President is to put them in that position and see what happens. And honestly, even then, it's a tough call. First, the President isn't as powerful as is commonly thought. This is not to say that they're not powerful (especially when you consider the large size of the Federal government), just that we attribute too much to any given president. People always seem to attribute anything good (or bad) that happened during someone's presidency to that president, and that's not always true. Many of the things a President will influence will take years to come to fruition (or to collapse, etc...) and when that happens, it will generally be attributed to whoever is currently president (I'm sure exceptions are possible, but that's usually the way it goes).
What I'm getting at is that measurement is difficult. The Presidency is a political position though, so the way we measure it is through votes. As you might guess, that's an imperfect metric. Honestly, metrics always pose a difficult problem, except in certain limited cases. So it's probably even difficult to tell if a single term President was really very good.
But at least you would have something to go by. It's why incumbents tend to do better than unexperienced challengers.
The same thing is true for just about any high level position, whether it be CEOs, Admirals, Generals, etc... I read a book once that went into how Generals and Admirals are promoted through the ranks. Once you get past a certain level, the only real way to make sure you've chosen the right person is to base it on their performance in that role. This presents a huge challenge in peacetime and in the transition to war, because no one has experience. One of the lucky things about WWII was that Roosevelt was an uncanny judge of talent, but even he couldn't tell you how good a given person was until he gave them a command to see how they did. One of the many tragedies of war is that if someone is given a command and they screw up, a lot of good people serving under their command will pay the price.
Similarly, if we elect a poor leader to the Presidency, a lot of good people will also pay the price, though hopefully not as steep a price as those in the military face (though the Presidency is ultimately responsible for the military as well...)
Surprisingly, the democratic process has not been that bad when you look at history. It's certainly not perfect, but it's reasonably good. Voters have all sorts of wacky systems for judging which candidate to vote for, but when you consider how large a pool they're part of, statistics starts to take over. Democracy is surprisingly good at this sort of thing. Of course, it is far from perfect (I subscribe to Churchill's philosophy: "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried")
So we can look at their public service and governing to get an idea of what a given candidate is like, but there's no way to tell how they'll react to the pressures of the presidency until they're in there...
~[private]
Unfortunately, the only thing that makes you a "viable experienced candidate" is to have already served one term as President.
We can talk about governing and public service and all that, and it certainly contributes, but in the end, the only real way to tell if someone would be a good President is to put them in that position and see what happens. And honestly, even then, it's a tough call. First, the President isn't as powerful as is commonly thought. This is not to say that they're not powerful (especially when you consider the large size of the Federal government), just that we attribute too much to any given president. People always seem to attribute anything good (or bad) that happened during someone's presidency to that president, and that's not always true. Many of the things a President will influence will take years to come to fruition (or to collapse, etc...) and when that happens, it will generally be attributed to whoever is currently president (I'm sure exceptions are possible, but that's usually the way it goes).
What I'm getting at is that measurement is difficult. The Presidency is a political position though, so the way we measure it is through votes. As you might guess, that's an imperfect metric. Honestly, metrics always pose a difficult problem, except in certain limited cases. So it's probably even difficult to tell if a single term President was really very good.
But at least you would have something to go by. It's why incumbents tend to do better than unexperienced challengers.
The same thing is true for just about any high level position, whether it be CEOs, Admirals, Generals, etc... I read a book once that went into how Generals and Admirals are promoted through the ranks. Once you get past a certain level, the only real way to make sure you've chosen the right person is to base it on their performance in that role. This presents a huge challenge in peacetime and in the transition to war, because no one has experience. One of the lucky things about WWII was that Roosevelt was an uncanny judge of talent, but even he couldn't tell you how good a given person was until he gave them a command to see how they did. One of the many tragedies of war is that if someone is given a command and they screw up, a lot of good people serving under their command will pay the price.
Similarly, if we elect a poor leader to the Presidency, a lot of good people will also pay the price, though hopefully not as steep a price as those in the military face (though the Presidency is ultimately responsible for the military as well...)
Surprisingly, the democratic process has not been that bad when you look at history. It's certainly not perfect, but it's reasonably good. Voters have all sorts of wacky systems for judging which candidate to vote for, but when you consider how large a pool they're part of, statistics starts to take over. Democracy is surprisingly good at this sort of thing. Of course, it is far from perfect (I subscribe to Churchill's philosophy: "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried")
So we can look at their public service and governing to get an idea of what a given candidate is like, but there's no way to tell how they'll react to the pressures of the presidency until they're in there...
~[private]
Re: So.. - tallman