IF BUSH COULD BE PRESIDENT ANYONE COULD-- UNLESS YOU THINK WE NEED A GOOD ONE

Matt Bai had a worthwhile essay today in the NY Times Magazine What Does It Take? The top dogs in their respective primaries don't have much experience. Hillary's 2 terms in the White House as First Lady may not count but she's the only credible candidate from either party that has won more than one statewide race!

George W. Bush’s legion of critics would probably assert that he alone lowered the bar for presidential preparedness, and this theory has some merit; having served just one full term as governor of a huge state before he ran in 2000, Bush was the least experienced nominee in 24 years. But American politics can never be viewed in isolation from the rest of society, and something deeper has been happening out there. The emergence of the Internet age has been accompanied, in general, by a steady devaluing of expertise. A generation ago, you went to the doctor to find out about the pain in your knee; now you go to WebMD, diagnose it yourself and tell him what medicines you want. People used to trust stockbrokers and insurance agents; now they buy and sell at E*Trade and compare policies online. American voters who once looked to newspaper columnists for guidance on politics now blog their own idle punditry.

Suddenly, experience is downright suspect-- it’s the barrier that so-called professionals use to wall themselves off from everyone else. Americans now belong to what the Silicon Valley entrepreneur Andrew Keen calls “the cult of the amateur,” and, in this new world, the ideal president may be one who hasn’t governed, or at least not for long.

...Then again, there are reasons to think that accumulated wisdom really does matter. Bush the Decider campaigned on the premise that a good president, like a C.E.O., need only be able to judge shrewdly among policy options A, B and C. But his presidency illuminates that running a White House isn’t, in fact, a simple multiple-choice test; a president’s advisers often disagree not only on the means of achieving their goals but also on the goals themselves, and a president has to filter out competing ideologies before he can clearly see the options laid before him.

Experience is what prepares presidents to stand by their convictions even when experts urge them not to, like Johnson’s signing the Voting Rights Act, or Harry Truman’s integrating the Armed Services. It is also what enables presidents to recognize when compromise-- even odious compromise-- is the last, best option, as Bill Clinton did on welfare reform. Lacking that kind of expertise, George W. Bush never did seem to master the balance between principle and pragmatism, the veteran politician’s art of when to build bridges and when to burn them. Whoever gets the nominations next year will want to study Bush’s experience closely-- if only because they may not be able to count on their own.

I don't want to argue with Bai about the relative merits of a sell-out hack with pseudo-journalistic credentials like David Broder-- let alone any of the "journalists" for whom Murdoch has purchased mainstream cred-- as compared to stellar citizen-journalists like Jane Hamsher, Glenn Greenwald, Marcy Wheeler, John Amato, Matt Stoller, Markos Moulitsas, Digby, Chris Bowers, Rick Perlstein, Taylor Marsh, Pachacutec, Christie Hardin Smith, to name a few.

Instead, I want to share a feeling I have about a certain kind of governmental non-experience. Today I interviewed Jonathan Powers, a young Democrat back from duty in Iraq and running against rubber stamp Republican Tom Reynolds. Jon, who some of us know from his real life role in the film Gunner Palace, will be our Blue America guest at Firedoglake next Saturday at 2pm, EST. Jonathan isn't an attorney. He studied to be a school teacher, led men into battle in Iraq and ran a nonprofit organization to help Iraqi children. His commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel William Rabena, described the young platoon leader as "one of the most talented officers I have known in twenty-two years of service in the Army [with] extraordinary management skills, leadership, and unmatched talent to accomplish the most difficult tasks with minimal guidance... the type of officer a commander only dreams of having in his unit." Or we can elect another careerist hack politician who went to law school.

Watching the way Blue America candidate-turned-congressman, attorney Bruce Braley (D-IA) took apart Lurita Doan, the GOP shill who Bush and Rove has politicizing the GSA, made me very proud that we have guys like Braley on our team. But I want to point out that lawyerly experience is not the only kind of experience needed in Congress-- not but a long shot. Last Saturday we had Darcy Burner as our Blue America guest, a woman who will bring much-needed expertise if the crucial technology world to a dinosauric Congress that will be passing laws touching on facets of technology they have little-- if any-- understand of. How about Victoria Wulsin's experience as a public health administrator? Or Angie Paccione who has committed her life to public education, social worker Carol Shea-Porter, environmental engineer Jerry McNerney. When you think about the experience a carpenter has do you think about Jesus? If you leave in Ohio's 14th CD, think about John Laesch too. There's all kinds of experience. The kinds that political hacks like David Vitter, Mitch McConnell, John Cornyn and Jim DeMint present is experience we can do without.