WASHINGTON, Aug. 24 — During Sunday’s Democratic debate, the candidates spent an awful lot of time discussing whether Senator Barack Obama has enough foreign policy experience to be president — so much so, in fact, that Mr. Obama quipped that “to prepare for this debate I rode the bumper cars at the state fair.”
But does time spent as United Nations ambassador, director of the Central Intelligence Agency, or first lady really cut much ice when you become commander in chief? A surprising number of experts on American presidencies said “no.”
“I think experience is a terribly overrated idea when it comes to thinking about who should become president,” said Robert Dallek, author of “Nixon and Kissinger, Partners in Power” (HarperCollins). “Experience helped Richard Nixon, but it didn’t save him, and it certainly wasn’t a blanket endorsement. He blundered terribly in dealing with Vietnam.”
Mr. Dallek — and every presidential historian interviewed for this article (four, if anyone is fact-checking), argued that the whole question of Mr. Obama’s experience is a nonissue, one manufactured by candidates in a hot campaign who are looking to exploit any perceived weakness they can find.
In the past 50 years, American presidents have come to office with a range of foreign policy credentials, from none (John F. Kennedy, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush) to some (Lyndon Johnson, Gerald Ford) to a lot (Richard Nixon, George Bush). Nixon and the first president Bush ascended into office with stacked resumes.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/25/us/politics/25web-cooper.html?em&ex=1188187200&en=c74f7782e476d1de&ei=5087%0A
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