What Does It Take To Run The Country?

What does it take to be president?
What does it take to be president?

What does it take to have the ability to run our country?  Seems like an easy enough question, or is it?  There are certain qualifications that we look for in our presidential candidates such as enthusiasm, experience, intellect, looks, charisma, business since, attitude, and judgement.  One group of people pick their candidate for their reasons, another groups picks their candidate for other reasons.  But this particular election in 2008 between senators John McCain and Barack Obama has raised several issues among voters. 

One of the main arguments against John McCain is that he has sided with the current administration 95 percent of the time, when the current administration hasn’t made decisions that are popular with the country.  The approval rating of President Bush is one of the worse in the history of the United States and the Barack Obama campaign is effectively linking his opponent to the unpopular President Bush.  On the other hand, one of the criticisms for Barack Obama is that he is young, hasn’t spent enough time in the senate and is relatively inexperienced. 

Well, if directly referencing the experience argument, it doesn’t seem to add up as some may want it to, especially when talking about what a presidential candidate needs to run the country. 

Candidates aren’t always picked by what they know, their experience, or how good of a job they’ve done in previous positions.  In 1960 it is believed by some that the tide was changed and Kennedy was able to defeat Nixon primarily because of how he looked in the first televised presidential debate.  Thats probably when the experience, skill, and knowledge of issues argument went out the window. 

Not only that, but some of our best presidents weren’t the most experienced and some of the worst were the more experienced.  Franklin D. Roosevelt was only a governor for four years.  His distant relative Theordore Roosevelt was less experienced than he was.  Woodrow Wilson and Grover Cleveland had only two years of experience of being a governor before they took the White House.  Oh yeah, and Dwight Eisenhower, had no political experience at all.  By the way, the group of those previoulsy mentioned were some of the more well liked, popular, and usually considered among the great presidents.

The “experience” argument should be replaced with the “judgement” argument.  Or the beliefs, direction, or what your candidate represents argument.  With experience should come good judgement.

Not for nothin’, but it sounds like Obama had it right when he said, it’s not about him, it’s about us.

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