"Hiring" the President

What is really going on right now is the world's greatest job interview. The interviewers are the American people, and the job is President of the United States.

I was struck by Bob Shrum's comment in today's New York Daily News:

"The pursuit of the Presidency is not a resume contest. Otherwise, a one-term Congressman named Lincoln would not have defeated Stephen Douglas, the "little giant" of American politics. Kennedy never would have prevailed against Nixon, and the young Bill Clinton never would have ousted the first George Bush from the White House."

Consider JFK's qualifications. He had been a lieutenant in WW2. He had served 14 years in Congress, 7 as a Senator. He had written two books, the Pulitzer-prize winning "Profiles in Courage" and "While England Slept," an analysis of British failures leading up to WW2. Kennedy made many missteps in his first year in office, including the Bay of Pigs, the Khruschev conference in Vienna (in which Khruschev was emboldened), and the construction of the Berlin Wall, which Kennedy was unable to stop.

It's true, a resume can get you in the door, but what really seals the deal is the job interview.

Thinking about Barack Obama, the first thing that jumps out to me is that he is actually younger than me by a few months. My natural reaction is--THIS is the representation of my generation that will win the White House?

I have posted before about generational shifts, and that there is a good likelihood of a generational shift this year because the median-age voter was born in 1963 and has very little memory of the 1970s. Obama grew up abroad and in Hawaii; went to Harvard Law School; worked as a community organizer, civil rights lawyer, law professor and Illinois State legislator before being elected to one term in the U.S. Senate.

How does this make one qualified for the Presidency? Sure, Lincoln had less political experience, but very few presidential candidates have had a resume this thin. Contrast this to Senator McCain, who graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy; commanded a Naval squadron; was a POW in Vietnam; and has served in the House and the Senate since 1982. McCain was in Congress when Obama was still in college. He's old enough to be Obama's father.

Obama has a disturbingly thin record when it comes to foreign policy. And one of his top foreign policy advisors, Zbigniew Brzezinksi, does not inspire confidence because he served in that role in the Carter administration.

But it's not just the resume, i.e. what they have done in the past. It is about what they would like to do in the future, and how they would attempt to do it. Obama's mantra, "change," is off-putting for me, much like Gary Hart's "new ideas" mantra in 1984 (you can expect a "where's the beef" response soon). Checks and balances are often a good thing, and with a Democratic Congress likely to continue, it may be necessary to have a Republican President to check their excesses.

And, as I have said before, to me the most important issue is the war on Islamic extremism, and who can best lead this effort. Although some say that the war in Afghanistan and the war in Iraq are different wars, to me it is all part of the same war, as events in Pakistan and elsewhere show. As Andrew McCarthy wrote,

"Jihadists are not going to be wished away, rule-of-lawed into submission, or democratized out of existence. If you really want democracy and the rule of law in places like Pakistan, you must kill the jihadists first. Or they'll kill you, just like they killed Benazir Bhutto." So for me, the issue is, which candidate will commit to prosecuting the war on Islamic extremism.