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What Sort of Experience is Needed to be a Good President?

by msdodger

Is there any specific experience that can best prepare an
individual to be the President of the United States? Service in
the military? Running a business? Governing a state? Or will the
much maligned legislative experience suffice? How much of the
right sort of experience is enough? Consider the resumes of two
of our best presidents.

Consider first Mr. Lincoln. When Lincoln came to office he had
served a number of terms in the Illinois state legislature, only
one term in the House of Representatives, had limited military
service, and his sole executive experience was as postmaster of a
small rural hamlet. Lincoln's resume has to be, if not the
thinnest of anyone elected to the Presidency, one of the
thinnest.

Consider next Mr. Truman. A failed businessman, a county
commissioner then a senator for less than two terms before
becoming vice president and ascending to the Presidency by virtue
of Mr. Roosevelt's death. His military career, while exemplary,
was also short. Any executive experience? To the extent that you
can call the Vice Presidency an executive position, he had about
all of a couple of months.

Truman and Lincoln are on most historians' short list of great
chief executives. And yet two thinner resumes would be hard to
find. So should the electorate always reject the candidate with
less experience in favor of the one with more experience? Using
this criterion Douglas should have been selected over Lincoln and
Roosevelt should have kept Henry Wallace as Vice President.
Fortunately in both these cases the more experienced candidate
did not prevail.

Bill Clinton said earlier in this primary season that electing
Barrack Obama would be rolling the dice, taking a gamble with our
future. Given the lack luster performance of many of out better
qualified former presidents, this is apparently precisely what
many of us our willing to do. Jimmy Carter had a splendid resume:
a successful farmer, a governor and a naval officer. On the
republican side Herbert Hoover also had a good resume: an
accomplished mining engineer, a successful administrator of a
massive food relief program in Europe and a cabinet officer. Both
Hoover and Carter have become, perhaps unfairly, the poster
children of failed presidencies.

Voters know that the quality of leadership is often completely
unrelated to the extent of experience. Voters are gravitating to
Mr. Obama, despite his inexperience, because they sense that he
has the leadership skills that other more experienced candidates
lack. Our history has given us at least two good "precedents" for
making just such a choice.

<body>Michael Sack Elmaleh is a Certified Public Accountant and
Certified Valuation Analyst. His book, "Financial Accounting: A
Mercifully Brief Introduction", has received wide critical
acclaim. He has nearly 30 years of accounting and 10 years of
teaching experience.His web site is <a
href="http://understand-accounting.net">understand-accounting.net<a/>
</body>

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