Thursday, September 04, 2008

"Experience" is value-neutral

Senator Biden has a great deal of experience in foreign policy. So did John Kerry. And Al Gore, Jr. And by the 1980 election, Jimmy Carter had 3.5 years of foreign policy experience as president and Ronald Reagan was the former governor of California who hadn't been in office in nearly six years.

Carter was the weakest president of the Cold War. Kerry failed time and again to get on the right side of history during the Cold War, so did Gore -- who only voted for the first Gulf War because he wanted to help his own record for the 1992 presidential race. And Biden has been wrong, wrong, wrong and wrong again on foreign policy for more than 30 years, as Peter Wehner describes in the column linked to this post.

A doctor with 35 years of experience who consistently failed to find disease in his patients, only to watch them be saved time and again by a better doctor who performed competent diagnoses, is not the doctor who should treat you if your other choice is a doctor who has less experience but makes the big decisions correctly.

Experience alone means nothing. Experience alone is not a qualification. Sometimes it's a disqualifier.

Two words: Joe Biden.

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