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May 11, 2007
Does Experience Matter?
Joe Klein writes:
There have been six elections in which control of the presidency has switched parties during the television age. In five of those six, starting with John F. Kennedy's victory over Richard Nixon in 1960, the less experienced candidate won. The other four were: Jimmy Carter over Gerald Ford in 1976, Ronald Reagan over Carter in 1980, Bill Clinton over Bush the Elder in 1992, Bush the Younger over Al Gore in 2000. The one exception to the rule was a toss-up: Nixon and Hubert Humphrey had similar levels of experience in 1968.
I'm not a huge believer in historical precedent, but that's fairly interesting. The problem, at least as I see it, is that all those candidates save George W. Bush were running against incumbents. And Bush was running against an eight-year vice-president. And he lost the vote. So the question of how important experience is when Americans want change versus how important experience is when they're tired of a particular administration remains fairly open.
May 11, 2007 | Permalink
Comments
JFK-Nixon and Nixon-Humphrey were similar to Bush-Gore: the losers were sitting Vice Presidents. Just a quibble.
Posted by: Dix Hill | May 11, 2007 1:58:25 PM
The party in power almost always nominates its sitting president for a second term or its sitting vice president for a first. They are by definition the most experienced candidates, and if we're only looking at elections in which power changed hands, of course the less experienced candidate won. It's tautological.
This analysis is about as interesting as the observation that if you go out in the rain without an umbrella, you will probably get wet. Klein gets paid for this?
Posted by: Mike B. | May 11, 2007 2:12:36 PM
I think people reach a point where they mentally find a answer to the question of whether a candidate has the total background to be a good President; experience is just one of those factors. Some other factors, like those below may influence that judgement on competence, but the result of them is a basic 'yeah, they could do the job' attitude.
Once past that hurdle, then other things become more important in choosing between the two final candidates:
- do they like one more than another
- do they favor the positions of one
- are they happy or angry about the current situation (favoring change more than stability or vice versa)
- has one candidate gotten them excited
- party loyalty and idealogical preferences
- feelings of one person having momentum, globally and within their circle of acqaintances.
I think Klein is mostly right: experience, as a resume thing, is not terribly important. It all depends on the current situation and candidates.
Posted by: JimPortlandOR | May 11, 2007 2:16:43 PM
God, I hate these kinds of arguments. Historical precedents are always broken; the sample set is way too small; you can always cherry-pick a single trait from the winners/losers of the last handful of elections and then make an amazing, sweeping claim as to how that trait is critical/fatal to a campaign. All other things being equal, why would Americans favor a candidate with less experience? When you look at why Clinton beat Bush I, why Carter beat Ford, why Reagan beat Carter, etc., the reasons have far more to do with the state of the country at the time, the personalities of the candidates and the campaigns they ran, not with a bias against experience.
Now, if this is an argument that "experience doesn't matter" - and god knows there are more and more versions of that faux-contrarian line being pushed every day at a time when the top contenders in both parties include two one-term senators, a mayor, a one-term governor and a first lady - then I'll just clear my throat and note that the country is in the middle of two failing foreign wars while its current leadership periodically ponders the possibility of a third, and that the next president is going to be expected to get us out of Iraq and "fix" Afghanistan somehow. The usual response by the "experience doesn't matter" crowd is that a good manager with good instincts can rely on smart advice from smart people without having much in the way of experience him- or herself. The obvious rebuttal to this is that this was precisely the argument made by the Bush camp in 2000.
Posted by: Christmas | May 11, 2007 2:37:22 PM
I think that "experience" is sort of a threshold condition that has to be met, but once it is, it becomes irrelevant. It seems like you have to have some base-level of experience to be taken seriously, but any additional experience beyond that doesn't give you any additional advantage (and can even hurt you).
This usually means at least one term as a Senator or governor. Prototypical examples: GWB, Edwards. There will be some grumbling about inexperience, but it probably won't really matter. Obama is pushing the outer limits of this category.
The sweet spot is about a decade in one of those positions - Reagan, Kennedy, Clinton. Giuliani.
Anything more than that, I think, is a drawback - Kerry, Gephardt, Dole - unless you've been the VP (Gore, GHWB) in which case you're not really running on your own resume anyway.
That's all assuming we can really draw any conclusions from history in this regard, which is questionable.
Posted by: Jason | May 11, 2007 3:05:34 PM
Mike B. and Christmas are right. Klein might as well say that the Washington Redskins can predict the election. Five out of six by a half-tautological definition, in a half-arbitrary timeframe? What do I have to do to get paid for this kind of insight?
Posted by: Cyrus | May 11, 2007 3:14:21 PM
I read an article -- way back when Nixon was running against Kennedy with the slogan "Experience Counts" -- that pointed out that the more able rise to the top the fastest -- that is, with less experience. Lincoln was one example.
Posted by: Denis Drew | May 11, 2007 4:35:49 PM
If you don't buy the tautological argument:
By my count more experienced candidates won 6/6 times when party control continued. Overall 11/12 times the controlling party managed to present the electorate with a more experienced candidate.
Posted by: ChrisB | May 11, 2007 4:53:00 PM
the more able rise to the top the fastest -- that is, with less experience. Lincoln was one example.
Interesting idea.
Posted by: Sanpete | May 11, 2007 5:04:08 PM
The point regarding both Hillary, Edwards and Obama is that they don´t have less experience, but that´s they have none. I don´t remember any candidate in the post-WWII that get the nomination with such lack of experience.
Kennedy almost lost, and he had TWO US Senate mandates and more than ten years in the House.
Posted by: André Kenji | May 12, 2007 1:16:14 AM
You are much to kind to the other Klein. You have proven that his empirical result is almost perfectly tautological as incumbency of one's party and experience are almost perfectly correlated (perfectly correlated if one claims that 5 = 8 as he does in the case of Nixon and Humphrey). Thus, since 1960, we have known before election day that a switch of party would logically imply the election of the less experienced candidate. The observation that, surprise surprise, after election day, it became clear that when there was a switch of party the less experienced candidate won adds nothing to our knowledge whatsoever. Joeseph Klein has presented an un-falsifiable hypothesis and drawn conclusions from the failure of the data to refute it. He demonstrates only that he is an idiot, but we already knew that didn't we ?
Posted by: Robert Waldmann | May 12, 2007 6:34:35 AM
That experience might be a disadvantage in this and some other elections (Joe K's actual claim), or that experience doesn't matter (a claim he doesn't make), isn't tautological or unfalsifiable.
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