These arguments suggest that which offices and roles presidents have previously held matter in getting elected. The amount of experience is important, but so is the type, and neither work suggests that long years in Congress or in a previous president’s administration are an advantage. [...]
There’s a slight correlation between years of experience and a worse ranking. It’s hardly a clear trend, but it’s not a ringing endorsement for the importance of political experience, either.
So does having lots of national governing experience make you bad at being president? Here’s where the “correlation doesn’t equal causation” warning comes in. Lots of things could be driving the relationship between the kind of politicians that get elected and their success as president. Parties could gravitate toward more experienced politicians when the coalition has been in power awhile and is starting to fray. Also, two of the experienced-but-terrible presidents, John Tyler and Andrew Johnson, became president through succession (they weren’t elected). And for presidents who took office at times of crisis, like Franklin D. Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln, it might have been an advantage to be unencumbered by political baggage. [...]
But perhaps some of the trouble in drawing a connection between presidential success and experience is difficulty in assessing presidential success in the first place. Buchanan was sympathetic to Southern claims about states’ rights and slavery and is dead last in our aggregate rankings. But while we excoriate Buchanan, slave owners, including George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson (along with notorious racist Woodrow Wilson), grace the top 10. Evaluating presidential success often ends in tying oneself in moral knots over slavery, segregation, war or something else. Or it leads to the question, for conservatives looking at FDR or liberals looking at Ronald Reagan: Does effectiveness matter if he was effective at something you think harmed the nation?
No comments:
Post a Comment