Reply #28: Obama is more experienced than either Clinton or Edwards

[zulchzulu]

Obama
8 years as State Senator in Illinois
3 years as Senator in Illinois

8 + 3 = 11

Clinton
7 years as Senator in New York
8 years as First Lady (not a legislative position, so 0 is the number. 1 if you count failed healthcare attempts, so we'll give you 1)

7 + 1 = 8

Edwards
6 years as Senator in North Carolina

6 + 0 = 6

Robert Reich said it very well:

Bill Clinton was 46 when he was elected president in 1992 – the same age as Barack Obama is now. But Clinton has questioned Barack Obama’s readiness to become president – arguing that by the time he himself ran in 1992 he had far more experience than Obama. He also states that when he decided not to run in 1988 (when he was “closer to Senator Obama” in experience) he didn’t think he “knew enough and had served enough and done enough to run” at that point in his own career. While I can understand Bill Clinton’s eagerness to undermine his wife’s most significant primary opponent, he is not, I believe, completely ingenuous. I happened to talk with him in 1988 before he decided not to run, and also in 1991 before he decided to run the following year. His calculation at both times was decidedly rational and entirely political, based on whether he could win.

But more to the point, it strikes me as unfair to claim that Obama lacks relevant experience for the presidency. When he ran in 1992, Bill Clinton had been the governor of a small, rural southern state; as such, he had only limited experience with national issues and no foreign policy experience to speak of. Incidentally, at this point in the 2008 presidential election, Hillary Clinton has served as an elected official in the U.S. Senate for not quite eight years, and before that a First Lady in the White House. Obama has so far held elective office for almost twelve years, at both levels of government – first as an Illinois state senator and then as a U.S. Senator. Before that he was a community organizer among Chicago’s poor, and then a civil rights lawyer – two experiences that in my view are critically relevant to anyone seeking to become president of all Americans. Obama’s international experience comes first hand – his father was a goat-herder in Kenya, and Obama spent a portion of his childhood in Indonesia. And as an African-American, with all the personal experience that implies, Obama seems particularly well qualified to understand the issues that need to be addressed in order to unify America and renew the nation’s moral authority around the world.

http://robertreich.blogspot.com/2007/09/qualifications-setting-record-straight.html