This’ll be the last I write or say about this (… come to think of it, this is also the first I’m writing about this — but I’m already tired of it).
So Barack Obama and Sarah Palin (and John McCain, and Joe Biden for that matter) don’t have much “executive experience.” Well it’s reassuring to know that even future President(s) of the United States have trouble getting past the same kind of non-thinking that dominates HR departments across North America:
“There’s nobody better suited for this job than you are, and we’d love to hire you, but unfortunately you don’t have X-Y-Z on your resume. The good news is that nobody else has that qualification either, so the position will remain unfilled, and you are welcome to apply for reconsideration should your qualifications change.”
But of course (as I read somewhere today, and elsewhere before — though I forget where, exactly) the only experience that truly qualifies anyone to be President of the United States is to have already been President of the United States.
Now I’m sure both Republicans and Democrats will agree that having 8 years of presidential experience does not necessarily make a candidate desirable for the job yet again.
It has been widely noted that the outgoing Bush administration — arguably the least popular, and among the least successful to ever occupy the White House — came to office as arguably the most “experienced,” and I suspect that Republicans wouldn’t be much more keen on the idea of re-hiring Clinton (who has a few months’ more presidential experience than Bush, and is therefore more qualified, according to the perverse logic that’s going around).
We can keep going around and around debating the relative merits of different kinds of experience, but in doing so we forget that that’s essentially what an election campaign is supposed to be all about.
We’re getting it backwards: election races are supposed to be a process of figuring out who’s the most qualified (and secondarily who has the best policies, which is more a reflection on a person’s general character and competence than about the policies themselves).
If we’re going to make it about technical qualifications, then this is really not something that journalists or political commentators are qualified for. This is really a job for a certified staffing professional. The more we criticize Palin and Obama, the more we draw attention to the fact that we, as journalists, don’t have enough “human resources experience” to decide who’s experienced and who isn’t.
Oh, did I say “journalists”? What experience qualifies me or any other blogger to have an authoritative (or even modestly respectable) voice in this?
So we go around and around and around and around… and eventually we come back to being responsible for thinking and talking clearly about ways to assess relative merits in dynamic circumstances, being pragmatic in our assessments rather than arguing from a priori definitions and metrics.
