The Burden of Experience

One of the central issues that democrats will have to deal with in the coming election is that of experience. Two of the three front runners in the primaries – specifically Obama and Edwards – have only a handful of years worth of experience in politics, and some democrats might hold that against them. Democrats however should be cognizant of one of the sad truths of politics today: that while experience is without a doubt an incredible asset in governing; it has become, in the modern political era, a serious impediment to acquiring the ability to govern. Simply stated, political experience has become the greatest of political liabilities.

It was the confirmation of John Roberts, a man with almost no experience as a judge, to the chief justice of the Supreme Court, which “confirmed” so to say, this principle. Any other nominee would have provoked a vicious struggle, but Roberts was handed the foremost position in the nations judiciary, ironically, precisely because he had almost no judicial experience. Without any knowledge of a man, there’s really no way to slander him, and what is American politics today if not a competition to see who can out slander the other?

Now one might object: “Yes it’s better to have no record than a bad record, but is it not better to have a good record than no record?” The answer is no, precisely because there is no such thing as a good record; any record, properly spun, can be made into a bad record. We saw that fact demonstrated in the 2004 Presidential election. Kerry’s war experience, considered by most to be his primary strength, was spun into a liability by the “Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.” Then Kerry's votes on military funding, which took funding away from obsolete parts of the military, votes which were at the time supported by people within the Bush Administration, were spun in such a fashion as to make Kerry look like a liberal commie, destroying our national defense by taking money away from the army. No good deed goes unpunished in the modern political sphere, and every record is a bad record.

Spin and Rhetoric are nothing new – they have existed for millennia before the American Union was so much as a twinkle in the eye of any democratic minded idealist. But a handful of changes have occurred in the past few years to make the airwaves more susceptible to outlandish and even demonstrably false rhetoric. Campaign finance reform has meant that more money has been flowing to unreliable third party political groups like “Swift Boat Veterans for Truth,” which can make outlandish claims without having to worry about tarring the reputation of their own candidate because the are, at least in name, independent of any party or candidate. Secondly, cable has opened the news up to more competition, and more competition means that news networks have had to sensationalize their news in order to bring in viewers. The result has been a rise in a new sort of yellow journalism, with Fox News at the lead. Finally, and most importantly, there has been radical shift in the way news networks conceive of their mandate for objectivity. Instead of having one impartial anchor, it's not believed that to be objective we need cross-fire style shows with two sides duking it. The idea is to be “fair and balanced” to allow both sides to represent themselves, even if one is demonstrably false, as was the case with the swift boat veterans for truth, who received amble coverage.

The result is that the modern political debate looks a little something like a court of law, with two lawyers arguing their case. We all know how fallible that system is, how one incredibly persuasive lawyer can mislead a jury; but the court of law has an advantage which the court of public opinion does not offer. The court of public opinion is not composed of a captive jury which listens to both sides and comes to understand the whole of the case, it is composed of people flipping through channels, who often times only get to hear one side of the story, or, who only hear bits and pieces of the issue, some of which directly contradict each other. This produces an electorate which has been either indoctrinated into false ideas without ever hearing the facts which would disprove them, or which has been profoundly confused by a flood of contradictory information. The prevalence of the later is why the great political debate today, the one which would provide either side with it’s end game, is not a philosophical one having to do with peace and war or capitalism and socialism, but is rather one about ethos – about which political figures can and can not be trusted. Look at the stream of political literature which is pouring into book stores nowadays. The books don’t have titles like “The Communist Manifesto,” “The Wealth of Nations,” “and “The Spirit of the Laws,” they have titles like “Lies and the Lying Liars who tell them” “Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot” and “One Hundred people who are ruining America.” The contemporary political thinker is not so concerned about winning a philosophical argument; his first goal is to prove that he’s the one telling the truth, because, in this day and the age, the truth is a very difficult thing to find on T.V.

It’s this fundamental difficulty with truth that makes John Roberts the best man for the job, that makes political inexperience the greatest of political assets. Nowadays, any fact can be altered, any act can be twisted into an unforgivable sin, and, subsequent to that, disseminated freely across the nation to millions of people, spread via word of mouth, and as indelibly grained into the American consciousness as if it were a fact. The only man safe from spin is the man who we know nothing about, the one for whom there are no facts to be twisted, the one utterly devoid of any political experience.