Barack Obama’s campaign has by all accounts been adept at selling their ideas to voters. In a sentence: after eight years of Bush, this country needs a president who can inspire citizens to believe in our democracy again. It is an ephemeral argument, and would undoubtedly be a flimsy one if it weren’t true that the country’s morale is as low as it has been in recent memory. John McCain’s main political rejoinder will echo Hillary Clinton’s: that we live in a dangerous world, and what’s needed is not a boost of inspiration but a sharpening of our defenses and a readjustment of our national priorities. Hope is easy, he will say; leading takes guts and determination. Leading takes experience.
The strongest argument against the experience argument goes something like this:
[President] Bush’s national security advisers were arguably the most experienced in modern times. But their performance was often very poor. That was partly… because they overlaid the post-9/11 challenges on a Cold War template about the uses of military power.
A more general argument is that the costs of ideological fervor in foreign policy tend to outweigh the benefits of experience. Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld are experienced at committing our country to ill-advised military adventures, and little else. Shouldn’t we prefer a rookie with good judgment, as we did with John F. Kennedy and Abraham Lincoln, over an old hand with a long history of being wrong?
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