Obama and the experience question

Absolutely the stupidest criticism that people make about Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) is that he's too inexperienced for the presidency. I'd like to devote this column to debunking that common claim.

Is experience a good indicator of a successful presidency? Not at all — look at this administration for an example. The Bush White House and State Department have been filled with career bureaucrats like Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld '54 and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz. They may have decades of foreign policy experience, but they're the ones who led us into Iraq, assuring us that we'd be greeted as liberators.

Quite simply, experience doesn't matter that much. One would imagine that a group of politicians who'd served in Washington since the Vietnam War would have learned a thing or two from it. Instead, the neocons in the Bush administration managed to once again get America entangled in a foreign civil war.

Meanwhile, here's what Obama had to say at an antiwar rally in 2002:

"I know that even a successful war against Iraq will require a U.S. occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences. I know that an invasion of Iraq without a clear rationale and without strong international support will only fan the flames of the Middle East ... and strengthen the recruitment arm of al Qaeda. I am not opposed to all wars. I'm opposed to dumb wars."

This man should be our next president. In one paragraph, he calls the Iraq invasion "dumb," he predicts a bloody postwar occupation and he foresees its potential to become a recruiting opportunity for al Qaeda.

For comparison, one week later, Sen. Hilary Clinton (D-N.Y.) voted in favor of the Iraq war, proclaiming that "Saddam Hussein has worked to rebuild his chemical and biological weapons stock, his missile delivery capability and his nuclear program. He has also given aid, comfort and sanctuary to terrorists, including Al Qaeda members ... this much is undisputed."

Obama is the only legitimate presidential candidate who has been right about Iraq since the very beginning. That's what matters — not how many years you've served in Washington, but how smart you are. Whether you've made the right decisions in the past and whether you'll continue to make them in the future is what matters.

Most Democrats realize this, and they would love to see the young visionary from Illinois take the Oval Office. Some are concerned, however, that, even if experience shouldn't matter, it does matter to the electorate. They worry that Obama would come across as too inexperienced if he had to run against a grizzled old vet like Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.).

Their concerns are misplaced. First, a short government resume is a political boon. The longer the list of laws passed or decisions made, the easier it is for an opposing candidate to pick something out that went awry and capitalize on it.

Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, recent history shows that people vote for the "outsider candidate." Former presidents Carter, Reagan, Clinton and Bush were all governors of Southern or Western states who framed themselves as reformists. They portrayed their lack of a Washington pedigree as advantageous because it would allow them to rise above politics-as-usual and actually achieve substantive improvements on the status quo.

Quite intelligently, Obama is framing his candidacy in similar terms. He may be a senator, but he's young, optimistic and new enough to be able to talk convincingly about crafting a new direction for Washington.

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His message is working. In a recent Bloomberg Poll, Obama beat all major Republican candidates in hypothetical 2008 match ups.

So the next time you hear someone start talking about how great Obama will be in 2012, you can sincerely tell them that yes, his reelection campaign will be a piece of cake. Jason Sheltzer is a molecular biology major from St. Davids, Pa. He can be reached at sheltzer@princeton.edu.