Judgement Trumps Experience
Sep. 16th, 2007 09:32 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
yesthattomWhen I was in college Ken and I ran for co-chairs of the social program committee. Our opponent was a woman named Rumi (the rules permitted people to run either as a co-chairs or sole chair who would later pick a vice-chair). Rumi had been on the committee for at least a year, and we had never been on the committee. The head of Student Activities, who later left the university to avoid a bribery scandal, wanted Rumi to win and knew that we would be trouble... we weren’t part of his inner circle.
Ken and I sat down and wrote our speech. We only had a few minutes of stage-time, so it had to be quick. I suggested that first we write Rumi’s speech, then write a speech that worked against it. We realized that her speech would be all about how we have no experience, and haven’t attended a single committee meeting, and she’s the one with all the experience.
When “candidate speech night” came, we all got up on stage and the moderator asked who wanted to go first. Everyone knows that it’s best to go second, so when they asked us to pick who goes first, we said, “we do!”. Rumi was surprised. I guess she had practiced both ways but was hoping to go second so she could rebut anything we said.
Ken and I got up to the microphone. Ken started to speak: “If you want the candidate with the most experience, the person that has been on the committee for years, that has been involved in every detail of past events and can sustain the social events as you know them...”
Then I grabbed the microphone, “And vote for our opponent, Rumi.”
Ken returned, “That’s right. If you want more of the same, vote for Rumi. Because we’re here to tell you that we’re the people with new ideas.”
I chimed in with a number of new event ideas that we had, and pointed out that I would bring back the traditional Rocky Horror Picture Show that used to always happen the weekend before Halloween.
We ended our speech and then turned the microphone to the moderator, who introduced Rumi.
She looked terrified. It seemed that ever sentence in her speech was about how experience was where it’s at. Our prediction was true.
Our speech was a hit.
Sadly, we lost by about 70 votes. And we were thankful, to be honest. We would have hated to been committee co-chairs. It would have taken up all our time, and we would have fought with the head of Student Activities all the time, or becoming part of his creepy inner circle.
This week Barack Obama gave a speech that attacked (without mentioning Hillary Clinton by name, I think) Democrats that voted for the war in Iraq without reading the intelligence. Hillary Clinton makes a big deal out of the fact that she regrets her vote and was fooled by Bush. The criticism of Obama is that he isn’t as experienced as Clinton, and his response is that the “experienced” people didn’t demonstrate good judgement.
Good judgement trumps experience?
President Bill Clinton’s administration hurt by inexperience at the beginning, but he got help.
President JFK’s administration was hurt by inexperience, but look at he accomplished? He didn’t have the burden of experience, which seems to include a lot of political debts to pay that prevent you from working on the agenda that you have.
The last couple Governors in NJ have been hurt by not having experienced staffers, who botched the first couple months. Corzine (our current Governor) was smart enough to fix this problem and have a chief of staff that had been in Trenton for a long time, so that he could navigate the crazy politics of New Jersey’s statehouse better.
Under President Bill Clinton the Republican Noise Machine learned that it can be very effective to have the president always distracted by some kind of made-up scandal or other issue. Even if it isn’t true, defending it keeps the entire staff from getting their work done. This time they will start this from day one. In fact, they will start the moment the primary elections indicate who the winner will be and won’t let up until the Democrats leave the White House. The ability to deal effectively with the noise will be the biggest factor in getting elected, and once elected it will be the biggest factor in having an effective presidency.
So the question becomes who will be able to rebuke the noise machine best... the easy target (Clinton) who will be able to learn from past mistakes, or the cleaner candidate that won’t have experience to deal with the attacks?
Ken and I sat down and wrote our speech. We only had a few minutes of stage-time, so it had to be quick. I suggested that first we write Rumi’s speech, then write a speech that worked against it. We realized that her speech would be all about how we have no experience, and haven’t attended a single committee meeting, and she’s the one with all the experience.
When “candidate speech night” came, we all got up on stage and the moderator asked who wanted to go first. Everyone knows that it’s best to go second, so when they asked us to pick who goes first, we said, “we do!”. Rumi was surprised. I guess she had practiced both ways but was hoping to go second so she could rebut anything we said.
Ken and I got up to the microphone. Ken started to speak: “If you want the candidate with the most experience, the person that has been on the committee for years, that has been involved in every detail of past events and can sustain the social events as you know them...”
Then I grabbed the microphone, “And vote for our opponent, Rumi.”
Ken returned, “That’s right. If you want more of the same, vote for Rumi. Because we’re here to tell you that we’re the people with new ideas.”
I chimed in with a number of new event ideas that we had, and pointed out that I would bring back the traditional Rocky Horror Picture Show that used to always happen the weekend before Halloween.
We ended our speech and then turned the microphone to the moderator, who introduced Rumi.
She looked terrified. It seemed that ever sentence in her speech was about how experience was where it’s at. Our prediction was true.
Our speech was a hit.
Sadly, we lost by about 70 votes. And we were thankful, to be honest. We would have hated to been committee co-chairs. It would have taken up all our time, and we would have fought with the head of Student Activities all the time, or becoming part of his creepy inner circle.
This week Barack Obama gave a speech that attacked (without mentioning Hillary Clinton by name, I think) Democrats that voted for the war in Iraq without reading the intelligence. Hillary Clinton makes a big deal out of the fact that she regrets her vote and was fooled by Bush. The criticism of Obama is that he isn’t as experienced as Clinton, and his response is that the “experienced” people didn’t demonstrate good judgement.
Good judgement trumps experience?
President Bill Clinton’s administration hurt by inexperience at the beginning, but he got help.
President JFK’s administration was hurt by inexperience, but look at he accomplished? He didn’t have the burden of experience, which seems to include a lot of political debts to pay that prevent you from working on the agenda that you have.
The last couple Governors in NJ have been hurt by not having experienced staffers, who botched the first couple months. Corzine (our current Governor) was smart enough to fix this problem and have a chief of staff that had been in Trenton for a long time, so that he could navigate the crazy politics of New Jersey’s statehouse better.
Under President Bill Clinton the Republican Noise Machine learned that it can be very effective to have the president always distracted by some kind of made-up scandal or other issue. Even if it isn’t true, defending it keeps the entire staff from getting their work done. This time they will start this from day one. In fact, they will start the moment the primary elections indicate who the winner will be and won’t let up until the Democrats leave the White House. The ability to deal effectively with the noise will be the biggest factor in getting elected, and once elected it will be the biggest factor in having an effective presidency.
So the question becomes who will be able to rebuke the noise machine best... the easy target (Clinton) who will be able to learn from past mistakes, or the cleaner candidate that won’t have experience to deal with the attacks?
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no subject
Date: 2007-09-16 06:10 pm (UTC)1. Obama has good judgement -- or, more specifically, better judgement than his competitors for the Democratic nomination. You don't provide a definition of "good judgement" so I'm going to come up with one based on the context of your examples above. How's "Good Judgement is learning from other people's mistakes without the need to make them yourself?" this matches both the student government example, and the Iraq War vote example.
I'm not sure that Barack Obama has good judgment in that sense. His Chicago housing scandal shows that he's willing to associate with people that he should have the good judgment to consider unsavory -- and he should doubly have the good judgment, after the Clintons' experience with Whitewater, to know that Real Estate scandals make good press, even when they're not really true. His comments on "acting" within Pakistan with or without Musharraf's consent don't taste like good judgment to me, either. Obama's Political Science degree had a concentration in International Relations, so he darned well should have an idea as to how his comments would sound.
2. Obama doesn't have the "bad" kind of experience, which involves "political debts [...] that prevent you from working on the agenda that you have."
As much as I'm unsure about your first point, I'm more sure that this point is incorrect. In part, for the last thirty years, every non-incumbent presidential winner ran as an "outsider," with the one exception being the elder Bush. Carter did, Reagan did, Clinton did, and W did, too. You can argue about which of them didn't have the bad kind of experience, but unlike Obama none of them were Washington DC insiders, all of them having been governors of Southern or Western states. (This commonality seems to make Bill Richardson the most viable candidate... and I don't exactly think that's true, but it's not inconceivable to me. I definitely wish that Mark Warner would run.) How many of them had delivered the keynote at the previous convention? How many of them had someone with the experience of Pete Rouse as their chief of staff?
Obama's debts may be somewhat obscure, but it seems clear to me that he has them. He's slick, he's packaged, he's running the classic "Washington Outsider" campaign, and I'm not really impressed by his speeches as a candidate; they definitely feel heavily focus-grouped. I don't really care whether they feel that way out of actual focus-group testing or out of his innate judgment and caution; I just don't like the sense I have that any personality has been submerged to groupthink, like the product of creative-writing workshopping, turning every piece into a smooth river stone.
Further, using the histories of the four above candidates, it's difficult for me to discover any commonality among their administrations. Other than Clinton, I feel as though they were largely the dupes of their Washington-experienced staff, and I don't see any sign that Obama would be another exception. (You could argue convincingly, I think, that even Clinton wasn't really an exception.)
And no, I don't like Clinton either, this time around. I'm reluctantly favoring Edwards, but to be honest I think it's a question of a few degrees between him and Obama, not a serious difference or preference. I'm disappointed with the field this year; I'd hoped to be excited by Obama, but I find him to be spewing the same pabulum as everybody else.
no subject
Date: 2007-09-16 09:11 pm (UTC)Not the 'signals', and 'messages', and 'letters', and whatever else the hell we are suppose to be 'sending' to whoever. I mean signal in the math, acoustical, imaging or radar technical sense.
Politicians have gotten very good at speaking a lot and saying nothing. The GOP had perfected the saying one thing and having two different sub populations of it's constituency hearing two different messages. The actions of the politicians are also at odds with there words.
The upshot is a lack of trust. Rebuild that trust, and whichever party rebuilds that trust will have a generation or more of solid support. Actions, speak louder than words. But being in the legislature most of the current candidates can not really 'do' much. But that excuse wares thin when they are also mostly unwilling to even talk about doing verifiable actions, or talk about even legislating verifiable actions.
Well okay, Ron Paul is talking like he means it, with a comparatively simple _self consistent_ and actionable signal. Perot, Nader and Dean to a large extent shar(ed) that. The closest the Democrats have to that right now is Kucinich. And they are trying to shut him up as fast as they can.
Complicated!
Date: 2007-09-16 10:19 pm (UTC)