Someone else noticed! 2008 candidates unqualified for Prez!
John B. Judis has a piece in The New Republic called “Nobody running in 2008 is qualified to be president.”
Someone noticed!! Well, knock me down with a feather.
Mostly behind a firewall, but the little you can read, includes this……
What worries me is the foreign policy experience of the six leading candidates. Four of them–Republicans Giuliani and Romney and Democrats Edwards and Obama–have none. Clinton’s experience was largely by osmosis when she was first lady. She remained on the sidelines as a senator. Only one of the candidates, McCain, appears to have thought long and hard–and to have been in the thick of the national debate–about America’s position in the world. But in his dogged pursuit of a neoconservative agenda, McCain shows little evidence of having acquired any wisdom from that experience….
Matt Yglesias concurs, and adds….
……Inexperienced candidates tend to make reference to the fact that they’ll be backstopped by veteran advisors and professionals which is, of course, true. The trouble is that what inexperienced presidents-elect normally do is decide that they want to keep their options open and parcel out the top jobs such that all the major strains of thought present within his party are represented at a high level. This, in turn, tends to lead to some of the floundering. People with conflicting visions get appointed because the president doesn’t have a clear vision of his own, and then the president approaches his early big decisions as a personnel management issue (how do I keep the whole team on board) rather than figuring it out.
I think there’s potentially a real problem here. A Democrat taking office in 2009 is going to face an ongoing national security crisis — call it “the Bush administration legacy” — from Day One. And, unfortunately, it’s not going to be possible to just press a button and undo it all.
The MSM and many in the blogosphere can’t seem to wrap their tiny little minds around this. They are, for whatever reason, happy with the “freak show”.
Cable news? Fine! They are in the entertainment business after all. But what I don’t get are the political blogs…..the big guys. Apart from Matt Stoller, Steve Gilliard and Steve Clemons, they all pretty much ignore the need for NS experience. They think that making Wes Clark SOS will cover it….
No! It won’t!
The President makes the decisions. With the country…indeed the world…in the mess it’s in, and likely to be worse by 2009, we simply can’t afford Hillary/Obama/Edwards in the driver’s seat. Muddling through foreign policy will not work. in today’s geopolitical climate.
Yglesias and Judis have shown they get it. And I fervently hope that Judis’s article gets talked about, passed around, and discussed on TV, because this meme will be perfect for laying the groundwork for a Wes Clark candidacy.
March 14, 2007 at 8:36 pm
He’s already being more Presidential than the others by trying NOW to stop the Iran war.
March 14, 2007 at 9:15 pm
That’s because he is a statesman rather than a politician.
March 15, 2007 at 2:57 pm
And, if these candidates really cared about the country, they’d spend less time on the campaign trail and more time trying to do something about the possible war in Iran. Just another example of how Clark cares more about his country than politicking.