History repeated itself recently when John McCain suggested that his running mate, Sarah Palin, is an experienced hand when it comes to national security issues because the state she serves as governor, Alaska, is close to Russia and because she commands the state’s National Guard.
It was reminiscent of a flashpoint in the 1992 presidential election. That year, attempting to respond to charges that he wasn’t prepared to lead the United States on national security, Bill Clinton pointed out that he was commander of his state’s National Guard. From that point, it became a stump speech staple of the incumbent President, George H.W. Bush, to scornfully ridicule the fitness to lead of “the commander of the Arkansas National Guard.” Because Clinton and his campaign were right in believing that the central issue of 1992 was “the economy, stupid,” Clinton’s alleged lack of national security heft and his lame defense of the same proved to be moot; Clinton won in a close three-way race.
National security doesn’t appear to have center stage in 2008 either, meaning that questions about the fitness in this realm of Sarah Palin–and, for that matter, Barack Obama–may not be that important to voters. Nonetheless, national security fitness is important in evaluating potential the candidates.
Presidents make foreign policy and since World War 2, the power to make war, in spite of legislative attempts to check that power, has been largely ceded to the occupants of the White House.
But how does one measure the fitness of a presidential or vice presidential candidate for dealing with national security?
History suggests that actual military or foreign policy experience may not count for much.
The two greatest war-time presidents in US history had almost no experience with war-making prior to coming to office. Abraham Lincoln spent a few weeks as the elected captain of a militia during the Black Hawk Indian War. By Lincoln’s own admission, he and his volunteer corps spent most of their time searching prairie thickets for enemies they never found. Franklin Roosevelt served as assistant secretary of the Navy during the one-year engagement of the US in World War 1, but he never served in the military.
Most US military careerists who became president have either done poorly or they served for so short a time that their service can’t be fairly judged. One, Dwight Eisenhower, who spent nearly forty years in the Army, proved to be an effective president, managing to keep the US out of armed conflict at the height of the Cold War, no mean achievement and, as he told a friend in a letter, no accident. (See here.)
In the realm of foreign policy, few of our presidents had much experience on taking office. Harry Truman is an interesting modern example. His is a mixed record, I think: correct in establishing containment as the policy which ultimately helped protect the country and brought down Soviet Communism and misguided for going into Korea.
In the end, Senator Obama is probably right: In matters of national security, judgment is more important than experience.*
And who has the better judgment, Obama and Biden, on the one hand, or McCain and Palin, on the other? That’s a judgment each of us will be called to make in November. But whether a candidate led a state National Guard or edited a student law review is irrelevant to that judgment.
Instead, we’ll have to evaluate how each of the candidates have discharged their duties in life and whether they seem to possess the maturity, the insight, and the vision needed for dealing with national security issues.
[This has been crossposted on my personal blog.]
*You’ve probably heard the saw about the person who claimed to have twenty-five years of solid experience, but turned out to have one year of disastrous experience repeated twenty-five times. That can happen with politicians as much as it does the rest of we who make up the unwashed masses.
[Above image from Yahoo.com]