An Essay About 'Experience'

Experience: (ex-pe-ri-ence) noun, active participation in events or activities, leading to the accumulation of knowledge or skill.

If you strip away the months of campaigning, the millions spent, and the uncounted hours of news coverage, this year’s U.S. Presidential campaign really boils down to two words – 'change' and 'experience'.

Leaving 'change' aside for a minute, let’s chew a bit on that second word, "experience."

Everyone seems to be talking about it. For months Hilary Clinton said Barak Obama didn’t have enough of it, at least not enough to answer a phone intelligently at 3am. Now the Republicans have picked up the same refrain. Democrats, on the other hand now declare that John McCain’s Vice-Presidential pick, Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, doesn’t have anywhere near enough of it to be a ‘heartbeat’ from the Presidency.

But for all this talk, talk, talk about ¨experience¨ no one ever seems to explain what they mean by it.

Above is what the American Heritage Dictionary on my shelf has to say (one definition among many). It implies that if a person has done a particular thing in the past that he or she will be wiser in doing the same thing in the future. Maybe.

Okay, let’s start with something easier than politics – driving. I got my drivers license a very long time ago and therefore qualify as an “experienced” driver. And it is true that after a few decades behind the wheel I am now unlikely to repeat the driving adventure I had at 19, when I backed my small Opel onto the hood of a freshly-painted yellow Corvette and drilled a hole through its hood with my exhaust pipe (its startled owner made a valiant effort to kill me afterwards). I am not, however an experienced Cochabamba driver (less than a year behind the wheel) which is one reason why I can never figure out where one is supposed to stop at poorly marked intersections. Along with other such foibles that have earned me the recent nickname “idiota.” So as far as driving goes, experience seems to be of use.

But how does the test of experience apply to political leadership?

Both McCain and Obama are running for President of the U.S. If direct experience alone was an indicator of wisdom for that particular job that we might conclude that George W. Bush would be, by far, the wisest person to hold it. He has been President for eight years and has had many Presidential experiences. But “wisdom” and “George W. Bush” are not terms one finds together in a Google search. And, as many have noted, few people brought as much experience to their jobs as Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, and their work didn’t turn out so well.

It turns out that experience only leads to wisdom if you learn from your mistakes instead of deny them.

So, given that none of the Democratic and Republican candidates have had actual experience being a President, what “experiences” have they had that simulate the job and what have they learned?

John McCain frequently cites the five years he spent as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam. That tells us that he knows how to deal with pressure and that is a good experience for a President to have. Truly, we do not want someone in the oval office who will “freak out” in the midst of a global crisis. “Freaking out” and “nuclear weapons” are a pair of terms we hope to not find listed together in a Google search.

Barak Obama worked as a community organizer in Chicago. As someone who has also been a political organizer for a good portion of my life I think this is useful experience. It surely taught him about what motivates people politically and how to engage people in a meaningful way in public affairs. That seems at least on par with George W. Bush’s MBA from Harvard and his stint as owner of a professional baseball team. I’m just saying.

Sometimes if you don’t have a lot of personal experience you can borrow someone else’s. This is what then-candidate Bush did with Dick Cheney eight years ago and it is essentially what Barak Obama is doing with Joe Biden – borrowing decades of foreign policy experience to compensate for the lack of having it personally. But, as Dick Cheney demonstrated, how well that works depends on whose experience you are borrowing. Sometimes borrowing doesn’t work out so well.

John McCain has taken a novel twist, borrowing someone else’s “inexperience” to try to compensate for his own overabundance of it, after many decades in the Senate. Governor Palin has said in various interviews that she considers her complete lack of experience in national affairs to be a key asset, allowing her to be open to fresh approaches. Maybe, but the fact that I have never flown an airplane doesn’t necessarily speak well for the “fresh ways” in which I might control a Boeing 727. Obama can at least point to four years on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Nevertheless, to avoid leaving his pick for V.P. dangling as someone utterly without experience in foreign affairs McCain points to the fact that she serves just across the Bearing Strait from a newly aggressive Russia. Maybe I am alone in this, but that seems like a stretch, unless there is some secret threat of a Russian invasion of Juneau that we don’t know about.

That is not to say that Governor Palin does not have other experiences that could bring other forms of wisdom to the White House. She is a chief executive, albeit briefly and of a small-population state. That’s useful. She’s a Mom, and given recent revelations it seems that she has had to deal up close with some of the harder challenges that families have. That’s useful as well, if it has actually opened her mind instead of making it more closed (the Governor is strictly against abortion rights).

There is a rough parallel here in Bolivia, with the case of our friend Casimira Rodriguez, who served as Minister of Justice in the first year of the Morales government. Much ado was made, in Bolivian and globally, of the fact that Casimira had once been a maid. Missing from that caricature was the fact for two decades afterwards Casimira had been leading powerful efforts regionally, nationally and internationally, to organize household workers in defense of their labor rights.

I used to sell vacuum cleaners at Gemco a long time ago (I was particularly good at throwing dirt down on a carpet at the feet of startled shoppers) but when I am quoted in the New York Times or Miami Herald my vacuum selling days are rarely mentioned.

As Casimira observed amidst criticism of her appointment and of her not being a lawyer (the position was not a legal one, as is the post of Attorney General), “I certainly have experienced injustice.”

So when it comes to “experience” it does not all need to be of the traditional variety. The issue is not length of years served, or the prestige of the job, but the amount of wisdom gained and how that wisdom applies to the task at hand.

So, is experience is your thing, as opposed to positions on issues like war and health care (I personally find such things important) then take your pick:

Prisoner of war turned politician
Community organizer turned politician
Hockey mom novice governor
Senator forever

It’s a pretty diverse menu.

But I wish just one had sold vacuums. You just can’t discount what that teaches you about defending against foreign aggression, and carpet dirt.


A note to readers: I am off Wednesday to Argentina for two weeks for a project we are doing there related to citizen vigilance over public budgets. But The Democracy Center team will be on hand in Cochabamba to keep you posted on events such as the Electoral Court’s slap down of Evo´s plans for a December 7 vote on the new constitution, and other changes in the Bolivian wind.