It is often argued that in the democratic field Hillary Clinton's chief advantage over Barack Obama is her greater experience.

Although this is somewhat taken for granted I'd like to get a good take on just how large that experience difference is and in what areas is it a factor.

A brief look:

Barack Obama
* Editor for the Business International Coporation's international financial information division.
* Employed by the New York Public Interest Group
* Community Organizer in Chicago with special focus on Low Income neighborhoods. /Voter Registration
* Harvard Law Grad: First Black President of the Harvard Law Review
* Law work including discrmination and voting rights claims
* Illinois State Senator
* U.S. Senator

Hillary Clinton
* College Political Activity ranging from President of the Wellesley Young Republicans to president of the Wellesley Student Government Association
* First Wellesley Student to deliver the commencement address
* Volunteer law work for the poor and victim's of child abuse
* Researcher for Mondale's Migrant Worker Subcommittee
* McGovern campaign worker
* Attorney for Children's Defense Fund
* Staff advisory for the Nixon impeachment
* Arkansas' First Lady
* Continuing work in child advocacy
* Law firm Partner
* Chair of Arkansas Educational Standards Committee
* Chair of the American Bar Association's Commission on Women in the Profession
* Board member for TCBY, Wal-Mart, and Lafarge
* U.S. First lady
* Chair of Task Force on National Health Care Reform
* Various efforts on children's and Women's rights as first lady
* U.S. Senator


How substantial is the difference in experience between Sen. Barack Obama and Sen. Hillary Clinton?

In what areas and what ways is the difference in experience most important?

Would that difference be a key issue in your decision to support/ oppose either candidate?

How substantial is the difference in experience between Sen. Barack Obama and Sen. Hillary Clinton?


Curious: If by difference you mean 'gap,' then I take objection. The difference is substantial, but not because one trails the other in experience. The notion that there is a single trail to the presidency is the one I have a problem with.

Experience is one of the least deconstructed, most cumbersome buzz words of the 2008 election-- like "charismatic" it covers up a myriad of inexactitudes.

Here's the thing about the presidency: it's not a job with an easily defined set of responsibilities. George H. W. Bush treated the office like as a desk behind which one could influence world affairs-- a top-diplomat-in-chief position -- fitting for an ex-top diplomat. Bill Clinton's focus was decidedly domestic -- fitting for a governor. Both were successful in those respective areas.

Bush, on the other hand, came into office with considerable domestic experience as a two-term governor of one of our largest states.
If 9/11 never happened, I have the sense that he would have been a *bearable* hands-off Eisenhower-type president, more interested in forwarding tax cuts, limiting stem cell research, and maybe privatizing social security than waging two multi-trillion dollar wars in the mid-east. I bet he would have been elected to a second term. I'll give Bush this credit: I strongly disagree with his positions on domestic policy, I think he would have made a relatively smooth sleeper-president, a 50 year golden jubilee way to relive the Eisenhower days.

But 9/11 happened, and Bush was woefully ill-prepared for the needs of the day. He turned out to be constitutionally ill-suited for the role history dropped on his shoulders.

So there isn't one set of experiences that qualify a president. It's not like a menu where oh, I get an extra soda and constitutional law professorial experience with Barack.

There's an array of diverse experiences each one offers, and we have to decide which one suits the moment at hand.

Hillary Clinton has less legislative experience than Barack, but far more experience as a candidate (or candidate's spouse). My sense is that she is vying for the nomination not on the basis of what kind of president she would be so much as what kind of candidate she would be -- a winner, a warhorse, a known quantity.

Barack's experience is that of urban, black democrat in two predominately republican legislatures: the Illinois state senate and the 2005-2007 republican-held senate. He claims to be able to build bridges and push through bipartisan legislation, and some of that is real, while some of it is just asserted through his two wonderful books and his many crowd-titillating speeches. And those speeches, in turn, could help legislation get through.

So the question in regards to experience is, do we need a candidate, someone forged, tested, melted, then dipped in steel by the battles of the 90s? Or do we need a bridge builder, someone used to working with a largely or predominantly republican-held congress?

Which one fits the moment?

...and more than its fair share of plain old inaccuracies, I agree.

I carefully avoided characterizing the differences in experience even though the media certainly hasn't.

I started the thread because I as puzzled as to why it is popular to describe Clinton as "vastly more experienced" which seem to me not to mesh with reality.

How substantial is the difference in experience between Sen. Barack Obama and Sen. Hillary Clinton?
I think Clinton has considerably wider experience though Obama has the kind of experience I'd like to see in a president.

In any case the difference is hardly as overwhelming as often portrayed. Certainly if experience is Clinton's main selling point, she needs another

In what areas and what ways is the difference in experience most important?
I think you can tell a lot about a person by what they return to time and again.

Obama worked with the economically disadvantaged and for voting rights.

Clinton worked for child advocacy.

I simply think the first bodes better for a president.

How substantial is the difference in experience between Sen. Barack Obama and Sen. Hillary Clinton?

As politicians I don't believe there is much of a difference in the two candidates. Their positions are very much similar, I read a recent account of their voting differences and it was very limited, they are both for and have proven they support the democratic establishment. I think that is why the race between them has become so centered on identity.

In what areas and what ways is the difference in experience most important?

That is so subjective and it not only relates to each candidates policies or form as a politician but also their identity as a leader and a role model etc. Certainty no wrong or right answer but the answer turnea gave still made me uncomfortable.



Why?
This just seems like more of the same argument that is making me so despondent with our current leaders in the democratic party, who has the greater personal triumph to overcome, whose injustice in life is more appealing? More children die in a year in the US as a result of child abuse or neglect then do American soldiers in Iraq, and this is just fatalities. Children in America are living in poverty, rotting in jails or what they call the cradle to jail pipeline, without health insurance, dropping out of school, getting pregnant on and on I could go and the fact is that not one of them has a voice in our system. They can't vote, or lobby our government for change, they need someone else's voice to do it for them.

Not that I don't care about poor people (children are poor too) or voting rights (children have none) but I don't see how one cause is more appropriate than the other.


Obama has made me uneasy in the "experience' genre because I saw this pamphlet that was sent out by his campaign in SC where he reinstated his status as a Christian in a real heavy image way, with the claim he has been "called to action" and "called to Christ" and a soldier of god is the last kind of experience I was hoping for our new President.

Oh, don't get me wrong. I don't belittle either child advocacy or the plight many children in America face. I work with at-risk children myself, in my own small way (night-staff at a treatment facility with the opportunity to be a sounding board when need arises).

I was simply saying that many of these problems have their roots in what Obama has experience with: poverty and the political alienation that sustains it.

I think child advocacy experience it great for a legislator as it can inform how related bills are written. But a president must be a big picture person and the big picture are the classic American divides of race and class.

It's actually why of all the leading contenders I like the sound of Edwards the most. Only the protectionist views and the electability issue concerns me with him.

The "Christian-ier than thou" attitude is pure pandering I agree.... but it not a deal-breaker in my view.

Keep in mind he's fighting rumors that he is a covert Muslim, sent to destroy America from the inside out. I agree the case is over-stated and suspiciously political, but in reading Barack's autobiography, and hearing his speeches on faith, I have found his views on faith to be remarkably tolerant, judicious, and well, sane. I wish I could find the passage from his book where he converts, it would illuminate this subject.

And my argument was that the ideas of experience in these sort of discussions is highly subjective. I could just as easily argue, as I already did, that child advocacy does include poverty and political alienation because children are citizens who have no political voice and children are more harmed by the affects of poverty...violence, poor nutrition, drug abuse, poor education etc. In my personal view in order to best address our national ills when it comes to poverty we need to reach out to the children who live in poverty. Offer them better educational opportunities, ensure them better access to nutritional foods, health care, good role models etc. It is harder to get to adults in these situations as we don't see them come to our public facilities 5 days a week for over 8 hours a day. With the exception of incarceration, but that is why I used the cradle to jail pipeline in my original argument.



Pandering indeed, and a disappointment for someone who claims to wish to engage us all in a new way. The religious focus on politics in the US has been an increasing movement I am concerned with and do wish was included in the idea of change. Not a deal breaker for me either, really, as I will vote Democratic no matter who has the nomination.



And who seriously believes this Muslim sabotage conspiracy? Ron Paul supporters? We have already been shown that they are hardly a political movement to concern ourselves with.

You would be highly suprised- I had this argument with my Mom and Dad- "everybody knows he is muslim"- seriously.

I sat at work with a supposedly educated co-worker that also repeated that same story- almost verbatim. Everytime it amazes me that some folks can be that ignorant.

Let's not forget that there is a sizable part of the US population that actually believed the Swift water liars, and the "Clinton Chronicles"- I mean- how moronic can some folks be? - apparently- there is no shortage of these horribly uninformed and gullible voters.

I agree that's a big part of the solution though I don't think these are centerpieces of Clinton's advocacy. There's important work on foster care and health though.

Just the same although there are others issues to consider especially when it comes to urban poverty. Realizing that urban "ghettos" and high crime can be directly traced back to policy decisions and that concentrated poverty in this country is a systematic error rather than an inevitability is something that an urban community organizer and civil rights worker understands better than most.

People talk about Obama's supposed ability to help "end" the race issue in America.

That of course is a monumental overstatement of his (or any leader's) importance to that particular cultural and psychosocial dynamic as things like the Implicit Association Test clearly show....
The Bias Finders

...but changing the facts on the ground would go a long way. A president who could push for mixed-income housing, universal healthcare, and education overhauls.

I know I'm dreaming... but think of it.

My god-mother, an blue-blooded, elderly white women who grew up in Daisy, Georgia and has no taste for the rancor of politics "believes this Muslim sabotage conspiracy." And a shame, too. Here is a women who is the exact type of person Barack Obama should be appealing too: a moderate, polite and refined lady who worries deeply about the direction of our nation but has been turned off by the negative tone of politics.

She's the kind of person, irrespective of gender, age, race, or locality, that our system needs to enlist in the process: she's in that huge percentage of Americans who don't vote, don't pay attention, but care. There are millions of Americans who don't vote, not out of apathy, but because the negative timbre of modern politics is designed to pad down turn-out and incite fringe groups at the expense of moderate participation. Again, and again studies have proven that negative ads decrease voter turn-out among moderates. It turns folks off.

People like my god mother should vote. Moderate voices like hers should be heard. But they are shut-out by a political system that alienates moderate voices by appealing to voters along harshly ideological lines.

Barack Obama at least claims to be the type of post-partisan pragmatist that would reach out to said god mother. But last time i had lunch with her, she said she wanted to vote this time around (for Obama), but just couldn't vote for a muslim. She's read the email, she believes it. She's not the only person I've heard talk about that email.

It's a serious deal, that e-mail. It's a big disappointment for everyone except the most cynical of Hillary Clinton supporters. Wish we could have a politics free of these kinds of subterranean attack jobs.

So, back to the point, I understand why Obama ramped up his Christian qualifications.


PS- how amazing. an elderly white lady who came of age at a time when a black man couldn't even whistle at her, is now ready, in the twilight of her years to elect a Black man with the unlikely biography of Barack Obama. That's an amazing accomplishment, or would be if it weren't for that persistent muslim rumor.

Well each of us feel that our community's needs can be best addressed differently and so we each look for different qualifications or what we call experiences. I don't disagree with any of your selections of experiences for Obama as bettering him for the presidency. I mostly am arguing that these ideas of the most experienced candidate are very subjective and can be of more importance or not in accordance to the issue you feel are of more importance (or not).



Well I see nothing wrong with your dream and I carry my own hopes in regards to gender issues in the US and again the experience of each candidate in this case is far more obviously different and we each, based on subjective reasoning, value each differently.



I am a little confused by your anecdotal god-mother. Does she believe he is a Muslim or a jihadi? Because I hadn't really understood the outrage about him being confused for or being made murky in the Muslim way. Is this an insult...being Muslim? I had thought Obama's heritage and his non-Anglo sounding name was one of his perceived strengths for many of his supporters. It seems a bit counterproductive or at the least lacking in conviction on this point to then focus on the negatives of such a image.

The man has Hussein, one of the most Muslim names, as his middle name. That is an unavoidable fact and something I had thought many embraced. I thought the positives outweighed the negatives and that perhaps change meant we no longer demanded a president to properly and thoroughly authenticate themselves as Christian. Even the Republicans aren't demanding this too much of Romney.