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White House race heats up
04/11/2007 14:09 - (SA)
Washington - White House hopefuls are feuding over the blend of leadership and experience Americans want next, as foreign policy crises simmer and the mood of voters darkens at the end of the Bush era.
With no incumbent president or vice president in the contest for the first time since 1928, and government debacles like Hurricane Katrina fresh in the memory, competence and experience are buzzwords in the 2008 election.
Current and former state governors, lawmakers and a big city mayor in the 2008 race are reviving a perennial question in US politics: what is the best training ground for a president?
In recent times, former governors, flush with executive experience, have had a lock on the White House.
But lawmakers in the 2008 presidential stakes are asking whether decades of grappling with foreign policy issues might be the best preparation for an age of terror and globalization.
Republicans, as the party holding the presidency, may have most to lose: a USA Today/Gallup poll last week found 72% of Americans dissatisfied with the state of their nation.
So, Republican candidates like Rudolph Giuliani and Mitt Romney are trumpeting blue-chip leadership credentials and using experience as a weapon against Democrats like Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards.
"They have never run a city, never run a state, never run a business, never run anything, never had responsibility on their shoulders," said Giuliani, the mayor who steered New York through the September 11 attacks.
"They have not had executive experience, yet they are seeking the chief executive position in the United States."
Experience
Romney, a multi-millionaire former management consultant, is credited with saving the 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Olympics from financial ruin and was governor of Massachusetts.
"Hillary Clinton wants to run the largest enterprise in the world - she hasn't run a corner store," he said, in a campaign ad Friday.
"The idea that she could learn to be president as an internship just doesn't make any sense."
But Clinton said last week that the "kind of experience that the Republican nominees are exhibiting is the kind of experience we don't need."
She highlights her six years as a senator and eight in Bill Clinton's White House, when she broke the mould of first lady, and countless foreign trips.
Clinton also uses experience as a weapon - calling first-term senator Obama "naive" for offering to meet leaders of US foes like Iran and Syria.
But Obama argues judgement, not experience is most important, citing his early opposition to the Iraq war and Clinton's vote to authorize it.
"Despite - or perhaps because of - how much experience they had in Washington, too many politicians feared looking weak and failed to ask the hard questions," he said in September.
'War on terror
Democrat Joseph Biden rejects Giuliani's credentials and says, as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations committee he is best equipped to get troops home from Iraq.
"Rudy Giuliani - probably the most under qualified man since George Bush to seek the presidency," Biden said last week.
"There's only three things he mentions in a sentence: a noun and a verb and 9/11."
Another Senator, Republican John McCain, as a victim of torture while a Vietnam prisoner of war, says he is best qualified to judge 'war on terror' interrogation tactics.
Another Democrat, Bill Richardson runs ads modelled on a mock job interview, and his resume as a cabinet secretary, UN ambassador, and hostage negotiator.
"What makes you think you can be president?" the interviewer asks in a comic aside.
If history is a guide, Richardson's could point to his perch as New Mexico's governor.
Of recent presidents, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter served as governors.
Others, like Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, George Bush and Lyndon Johnson had been vice-president.
And maybe experience is not everything: John F. Kennedy was elected president in 1960 after serving as a senator and was seen by some contemporaries as green.
Yet, he is now revered for leadership mettle during the Cuban missle crisis in 1962.
- AFP
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