POLITICS
In Defense of Inexperience
By Stump Connolly
If Howard Wolfson has anything to say about it, you will come out of this August believing Barack Obama went to foreign policy school at a kindergarten in Iowa and – after getting one right answer on a TRUE/FALSE quiz: should we invade Iraq? – failed all the rest.
Wolfson, the press secretary for Sen. Hillary Clinton, has a vested interest in proving Obama is “naïve and inexperienced.” He has taken Obama’s answers to such questions as “should we talk with our enemies?” and “should we use nuclear bombs on Osama bin Laden? [answers: 1) yes, of course; and 2) no, of course not] to show the Illinois Senator is not as wise to the ways of the world as his own candidate.
In the debate in which the first question arose, Sen. Clinton was more nuanced in her response that she would meet with foreign leaders from Venezuela, Iran and North Korea only after lower level diplomats had set a clear agenda. But her response to Obama on the second was, in it’s own way, just as naïve.
The specific Obama quote that brought on Clinton’s attack came in an Obama interview with the Associated Press. “I think it would be a profound mistake for us to use nuclear weapons in any circumstance,” Obama said, adding, with a taint of regret, “involving civilians.” Catching the oddity of his answer, he clarified it. “Let me scratch that,” he said. “There’s been no discussion of nuclear weapons. That’s not on the table.”
It wasn’t, at least, until Sen. Clinton seized on the answer as another sign of her experience versus Obama’s lack of same. “Presidents should be careful at all times in discussing the use and nonuse of nuclear weapons,” she said. “Presidents since the Cold War have used nuclear deterrence to keep the peace. And I don't believe that any president should make any blanket statements with respect to the use or non-use of nuclear weapons."
By leaving her nuclear guns “on the table”, Clinton seems to believe she is demonstrating her foreign policy experience. Perhaps, given her range of experience, she can tell us how many times since the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1960, American presidents have threatened to use nuclear weapons. At a minimum, she ought to be able to tell us how many times her husband Bill Clinton threatened to use nukes during his eight years in office.
To score a few points for toughness, Sen. Clinton is, in effect, arguing against a half-century of effective arms control efforts that began with the recognition nuclear warfare will bring on mutually-assured destruction, and has led to significant new forms of global peacekeeping that have taken us back from the brinksmanship of the cold war. That, at least, is how I would phrase it were I writing for Foreign Affairs. But since all this bluster about who is more naïve and inexperienced is taking place in the heat of a political campaign, let me put it this way: Babe, get a clue. Dropping a nuclear bomb on Pakistan is a bad idea. Just from a global warming perspective.
In the latest New Republic, Theodore Sorensen, John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s speechwriter and confidante for 11 years, notes that the same charge of inexperience that is being leveled at Obama was once aimed at Kennedy. Like Obama, Kennedy, 40, was a first term Senator who entered the presidential race after an electrifying convention speech in 1956. His primary opponents in 1960 – Lyndon Johnson, Hubert Humphrey and Adlai Stevenson – all dismissed him as neither a powerhouse in Congress nor an experienced old foreign policy hand. At one campaign stop, Kennedy took up the challenge directly.
“Experience,” he said, “is like taillights on a boat which illuminate where we have been when we should be focusing on where we should be going.”
Indeed, if you look back at politics over the last 50 years, America has elected three “experienced” presidents – Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon and George Bush I – and five “inexperienced” ones – John F. Kennedy, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. How have we fared under each?
Johnson and Nixon can be credited with the worst foreign policy disaster of the 20th century. For all his experience, Johnson led America into the quagmire of Vietnam and Nixon not only extended the fiasco into neighboring countries but, fighting perceived enemies at home, broke into the Democratic party headquarters and got himself run out of office on a rail.
After a transitional two years under Gerald Ford, America chose the fresh face of Georgia Gov. Jimmy Carter to bring reform to Washington – and paid dearly for his inexperience when Iran seized American hostages in Tehran. When Carter’s time was up, another inexperienced candidate named Ronald Reagan took charge. Reagan came into office almost pugnaciously “naïve.” But this time, standing outside the nexus of power, he articulated a fresh approach to dealing with the Soviet Union – how much fresher can you get than calling it an Evil Empire? -- that brought a game-changing new perspective to the standoff of The Cold War.
The most successful of our experienced presidents was Reagan’s successor, President George H.W. Bush. He scored a triumphant victory over Saddam Hussein in Kuwait, shunned the idea of pushing forward into Iraq, and was rewarded by the American people with a resounding defeat at the polls after a single term.
Inexperience would not make a comeback on the political scene until 1992, when Bill Clinton brought it back in spades. The Clinton administration will be the most studied in American history because of all the contradictions inherent in how it worked out. But few candidates so singularly focused on domestic issues during a campaign – “It’s the economy, stupid!” -- have achieved so much in the foreign policy arena.
The last of the “inexperienced” presidents we have elected is our current President George W. Bush, who may also go down in history as our worst. The irony, of course, is that his most egregious foreign policy mistakes were not the result of his inexperience, but his reliance on his Vice President Dick Cheney and other old Washington hands whose experience in foreign affairs he acceded to.
Clearly, experience is overrated. From a statistical point of view alone, it appears we have a 60% chance of electing a good president when we choose someone who is not experienced, but only a 33% chance if we choose someone who is (and then we throw him out after one term.)
For an explanation why, let me give the last word to Sorensen on the similarities between Obama and Kennedy:
“Kennedy’s speeches in early 1960, and even earlier, like Obama’s in early 2007, were not notable for their five-point legislative plans. Rather, they focused on several common themes: hope, a determination to succeed despite the odds, dissatisfaction with the status quo, and confidence in the judgment of the American people.”
“On civil rights, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the race to the moon, and other issues, President Kennedy succeeded by demonstrating the same courage, imagination, compassion, judgment, and ability to lead and unite a troubled country that he had shown during his presidential campaign. I believe Obama will do the same.”
