Experience and the VP slot

There have been a lot of discussions in presidential campaigns about experience. How much experience is necessary to be a successful president? A successful Vice President? And what experience is relevant?

In this election, the experience question was most dramatically raised in the Democratic primary. Hillary Clinton ran ads suggesting Barack Obama did not have the experience necessary to answer the phone at 3 am. And over the summer, the McCain campaign attacked Obama as a celebrity with no experience. Now that Sarah Palin has been announced as McCain's VP nominee, the question has been raised again: does Palin have enough experience and the right experience to take over for McCain should the unthinkable happen?

First, let me say there is no constitutional mandate outlining the proper mix of experience. The only qualifications concern residency and age. That's it. The entire debate, then, is about the popular perception that experience matters and that some experience is better than other experience.

I was curious. How much experience did Sarah Palin have compared to other VP nominees in the twentieth century? And how does her experience as an executive--which the McCain folks argue is particularly important and useful--match up against other nominees?

I researched the backgrounds of each Republican and Democratic nomineee for Vice President, beginning in 1900. I looked only at elected office experience. Congressional scholars use this to define a quality challeger, so I employ the same definition here. I make no claims about the quality or type of experience in this analysis. That's up for you, the reader, to judge. I simply want to look at one easily quantifiable measure of experience. This chart here compares the Democratic nominee (in blue) to the Republican nominee (in red) in each election cycle:




Note that Palin is on the low end of elected office experience. Lloyd Bentsen is the clear winner here: he had more than 40 years of elected office experience when Mike Dukakis nominated him in 1988. Among Republicans, Hoover's Vice President Charles Curtis had 34 years of elective office experience when he stood for re-election in 1932. Overall, Republican nominees averaged 13 years of experience while Democratic nominees averaged 16. Palin's 12 years of elective office experience is just below the mean for Republicans, but she is certainly not the least experienced nominee in the 20th century. Among Republicans, Charles Dawes and Frank Knox had no elective office experience. FDR's second Vice President, Henry Wallace, was a well-respected agricultural expert and Agriculture Secretary, but similarly had no elected office experience.

Palin does stand out, however, in the amount of executive experience she has as a major party VP nominee. The modal category is zero--meaning most Vice Presidential candidates have zero executive experience. Look at this chart:




Republican and Democratic VP nominees average, collectively, about 2 years of executive experience. Again, we are only looking at elected executive experience, so Cabinet level offices do not count here. Among Republican nominees, only Earl Warren and John Bricker have more executive experience than Palin. Thomas Marshall, after serving a term as Woodrow Wilson's VP, had the same amount of executive experience as Palin does: eight years.

Drinking too much of the Kool-Aid

There's been a lot of attention in the last 24 hours to the issue of race in the presidential race. Obama has suggested that Republicans will attack him because he's black, and McCain has angerily rebutted that Barack is the one who is injecting race into this campaign.

I'm not terribly interested in this dialogue. I'm more interested in how McCain and Barack are trying to establish their biographical bonafides, to make the case that they can be the leader America needs.

Obama's campaign has been of the classic outsider variety: Washington is broken, and I am the one who can fix it. At times, his campaign has been inspirational and lofty. Of late, however, one gets the feeling that perhaps Obama is a bit overly impressed with himself.

McCain, on the other hand, began his general election campaign re-introduction with an ad highlighting his experience as a POW in Vietnam. Combined with an Internet ad release showing clips of Churchill and TR, the message was clear: he's a person of strong character and will, and hence, he has the capacity to be a strong leader. But one wonders if this is an advantage in today's political environment.

Both campaigns are centered on the question of leadership, but both are approaching the question from very different angles. Which dialogue will win is anyone's guess, but this election feels very much like 1976. Voters were disgusted with corruption and scandal, and wanted a fresh, honest face. That face, of course, was one-term Governor Jimmy Carter. Obama is this year's Jimmy Carter.

McCain's biography is his weakest and strongest suit. Voters are eager for change, and they've experienced a President who was certain that he was right. As Bush himself put it, "You may not agree with me, but at least you know where I stand." In this sense, McCain's inflexibility (an asset at other times) might actually hurt him come November.

McCain and his staff, of course, are worried that Obama's change argument will win the day. McCain's campaign has chosen to attack Obama's perceived strength--as an agent of change--by suggesting he's not experienced enough to do the changing. This is the classic response to an outsider challenge: sow the seeds of doubt among voters. But McCain's response is different from past attempts. Look here:



The McCain folks are lambasting Obama, ridiculing him. This is a stronger attack than the one Bush Senior made against Bill Clinton (essentially calling him a two-bit Governor of a two-bit state). This ad, along with the celeb ad, make us question Obama's sincerity and whether there is any "there there", so to speak. One might say that McCain is taking from Hillary's playbook: It's 3AM, do you want this guy answering the phone? Or, do we want someone else in the White House who doesn't have any doubts--just like W?

Doubts remain about Obama among voters. They should. He's less known than McCain--and there's a lot of time left to update one's priors and make a more informed decision about him. McCain is hoping that in voting for change, voters vote for experienced change. It's a risky gamble, but to win in November, McCain will have to take some risks in this political atmosphere that's becoming more and more toxic for Republicans.

Does Experience Matter? What does Skowronek think?

My students don't know it yet, but they will have to read this blog and comment on the post once they read Yale University political scientist Stephen Skowronek's influencial essay in Studies in American Political Development. The March 10th edition of Time Magazine has two fascinating articles on the relationship between experience and presidential success (see here and here). Unfortunately, the fantastic chart outlining the political experience each president had before achieving the Oval Office is not available online (I'm going to try and scan it and post it soon).

To quote from the first article ("Does Experience Matter in a President"): "At the same time, the value that voters place on resume is constantly shifting. James A. Baker III is an authority on this. In 1980, he managed the campaign of his well-credentialed friend George H.W. Bush, under the slogan 'A President we won't have to train.' But the public mood was sour on Washington, and victory went to an outsider, Ronald Reagan, who had never served in Washington."

How does this relate to Skowronek? Skowronek emphasizes that presidential success is less a function of individual skills and more a function of a president's place in historical and political time. In other words, great presidents don't make history but rather history makes great presidents.

The presidents with the most opportunity to transform the political landscape and implement a new governing regime, according to Skowronek, are the reconstructive presidents. Looking at the Time experience chart, what do all but one of the reconstructive presidents share? Very little previous political experience. Skowronek's reconstructive presidents are Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, FDR, and Reagan. Jefferson had the most governmental experience: 27 years. But the others had only 5, 10, 6, and 8 years respectively. That is to say that in periods of great political transformation, when the public wants to radically alter the path away from a crumbling regime, they turn to political outsiders.

What about the failed presidents, the disjunctive presidents that precede a reconstructive president? They are John Adams, John Quincy Adams, James Buchanan, Herbert Hoover, and Jimmy Carter. The years of public service of each prior to obtaining the presidency was 24, 30, 35, 8, and 8. The election of Jefferson is the only time a reconstructive president had more prior political experience than man leaving office.

Another way to look at this is to look at the candidate rejected during the moment when politics shifted from disjunction to reconstruction. And in every case, less experience won out if we count the time served as president. Compare the following:

Adams' 28 years to Jefferson's 27.
JQA's 34 to Jackson's 5.
Stephen Douglas' 20 odd years to Lincoln's 10.
Hoover's 12 to FDR's 6.
Carter's 12 to Reagan's 8.

Obama's campaign is prefaced on the politics of transformation and change. And he's a fresh face with comparatively little political experience. Should he win election, is possible that we may witness one of those rare moments in political time where great political change is possible and, more importantly, the nature of the political debate shifts in such away that future politicians for a number of years will have to respond to that shift? It would also mark one of the shortest tenures of a dominant political regime (the Reagan conservative regime) in American political history. It would also mean that George W. Bush would become the first two term disjunctive president--a president who was in office while the public roundly rejected the set of ideas upon which the president was elected and upon which a existing regime is predicated.

As a political scientist and a fan of Skowronek's work, I find this election to be absolutely fascinating.

And by the way, if Obama is elected president, that's 10 years of political experience compared to George W. Bush's 14.

It's Experience, Stupid

Hillary Clinton has a new ad out that is clearly aimed at the Soccer Moms, stressing that she has the experience to meet global crises and not (by implication) Barack Obama.

Check it out:



The problem with this ad, I think, is if you really want experience, then John McCain is your man. I just don't find it effective.

Furthermore, given that this ad appears to be geared to mothers, that suggests bigger problems for Hillary. It indicates to this political observer that she's worried about her base. And if she's worried about her base, it will be a long day next Tuesday.

I'll post again soon on the question of experience and the presidency.