In the U.S. presidential race, Hillary Clinton is claiming more experience than Obama. I wonder how useful experience is when you are president, given that every situation is completely different from the last.
I can see how experience would be useful for just about any other sort of job. If you’re getting a heart bypass, you definitely want the doctor who has done it before. But does experience really help a president?
First, there is no job that is roughly similar to being president. So no one except a president or ex-president has experience that directly fits. In that regard, Hillary does have relevant experience, in the sense that she can consult her husband more often than Obama could if he were elected.
But how often does a political issue come up for which experience helps? If it is the same issue that has come up for years – say the conflict between the Israel and the Palestinians – then the only experience anyone has is in failing to fix it. Experience in failure can be useful, but it’s not a good indicator of future success.
If an issue is something new, such as the recent mortgage problems, the president has no more experience with it than anyone else. Every war and every economic problem is completely new. If you fight a new war the way you fought the last one, you lose.
The one sort of experience I can see being useful for a presidential candidate involves public appearances, including speeches and answering questions in debates. Anyone who comes through the nomination and election process will have plenty of that experience. The ability to influence groups is a highly relevant skill for which experience is certainly useful.
If on-the-job experience helped a president, we would expect past presidents to have far more successful second terms than first. I don’t know how you factor in the lame duck effect, but is there historic evidence that presidents get more effective the longer they are on the job?
If you look at the great achievements in history, they are usually accomplished by younger people. Those people continue to acquire relevant experience throughout their careers but their successes do not continue at the same rate. For anything important, experience probably has a strong negative correlation with success. If that weren’t true, all the hit songs, hot startups, and new inventions would be coming from geezers.
Obama is often minimized by his opponents as being little but a smart guy who is a great talker. Realistically, is there any other type of experience that is more important for the job of president than learning how to be a great talker?