The Associated Press reports:
Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards acknowledged Monday that he may have been too inexperienced in national politics for his White House run in 2004. The former North Carolina senator was serving his first and only Senate term four years ago when he declared himself a presidential candidate. During a forum at Wake Forest University on Monday, Edwards said he might agree with critics who said he left Congress too soon to seek the presidency.
“They may have been right,” Edwards said, adding that the experience he has gained since the election has prepared him for another run in 2008.
Well, guess who has seen the light.
Clearly this is a shot at Barak Obama, who had only served two years of one term in the US Senate before filing for his presidential exploratory committee. It is a well-deserved shot, too, as we live in a dangerous world and 2/3 of one term is not a lot of time to build the experience that makes me feel comfortable with his hand on the nuclear button.
As Senator John Kerry said of Senator Edwards in the 2004 Democratic primary:
“No international experience, no military experience. You can imagine what the advertising is going to be next year,” Kerry said of Edwards at the time. “When I came back from Vietnam in 1969, I don’t know if John Edwards was out of diapers then.”
Here’s the other thing that got me:
[According to Edwards,] the experience he has gained since the election has prepared him for another run in 2008.
What has Edwards done from 2004 to 2008? He’s held two part-time jobs, as director of the Center on Poverty, Work, and Opportunity at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and as a senior adviser for a a Wall Street investment firm. How either of those jobs makes him more qualified to be president than he was in 2004 remains unexplained.
CAVEAT: Now of course there’s no hard and fast rules here, some certain number of years one must serve in a certain position to be “qualified to be president.” (After all, George W. Bush was just governor of Texas for six years. Mitt Romney was governor of Massachusetts for four).
Last 5 posts by Daniel- Tom Barrett's Savings Plan - June 8th, 2010
- C.J. Abrahamson on J. Stevens - April 11th, 2010
- Why always Bill Bablitch? - March 24th, 2010
- Suhr on Nixon on Health Care - February 23rd, 2010
- Did the USCCB Foresee Dead People? - February 8th, 2010
“It is a well-deserved shot, too, as we live in a dangerous world and 2/3 of one term is not a lot of time to build the experience that makes me feel comfortable with his hand on the nuclear button.”
I appreciate the caveat you included…. but does one get foreign affairs experience serving as governor? Conservatives seemed willing to ignore this in 2000 (Admittedly this was pre-9/11). However, Bush didn’t just bring his experience as Texas governor to the White House. He appointed experienced individuals. Sen. Obama (whose experience also includes years in the IL state senate) will likely surround himself with individuals who will make up for areas where he lacks experience.