First off: My name is Mia, and I’ll be joining the opinions section next semester as a regular columnist. I love music, politics, great food, good books, comedy and being outdoors. That’s all you need to know about me — on with the column!
For my inaugural column, I’m tackling a question I’ve been mulling over for the past month: Do decades of experience in politics — or business, for that matter — give us the clearest idea of who will best lead our country? In other words, what kind of experience makes a president most suited to serve?
I ruminated on this idea after Election Day because of the nature of our two candidates, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. Claims of inexperience, or too much experience, flew back and forth across the political aisle. Clinton said Trump didn’t have the political experience to take the office, and Trump shot back that Clinton had served too much time in Washington, making her corrupt and “crooked.”
Even now, President-elect Trump has promised to “drain the swamp,” meaning he thinks we have to “break the cycle of corruption” in our government and “give new voices a chance to go into government service.” This all comes from his website, donaldjtrump.com, and based on his current picks for cabinet positions, I have yet to see any “newcomers” join the scene. But that’s a column for another time.
Sometimes age plays a strong role in the question of experience. President Barack Obama is 55, taking office when he was 47, and he faced a sea of criticism regarding his alleged inexperience. Just a quick Google search with the keywords “Barack Obama inexperienced” dredges up plenty of circa-2008 stories on his experience (or lack thereof), ranging from websites like Politico and ABC News to Breitbart and The Huffington Post. Let me be clear, not all of those websites are news outlets, but, again, that’s a column for another time.
So I did some research, using President Obama as an example. He began his political career in 1996 as a senator in the Illinois State Senate. In 2004, he successfully ran for the U.S. Senate; in 2008, he became one of three one-term senators ever elected president. That’s the crux of it: He didn’t have decades of experience in an elected office before he landed the presidency.
Here’s what I think. Even if you disagree with President Obama on core issues, maybe environmental protections, reproductive rights or the Affordable Care Act, I assert that he truly fought for those issues as effectively as he could with Congress working against him. Essentially, he didn’t need a half-century of experience as an elected politician to get the job done.
Before you stop reading and think I voted for a “Washington outsider” like Donald Trump because he, too, lacked years in an elected position, know this: Hillary Clinton, like Barack Obama, worked tirelessly in her roles in politics to advance the issues she cared about. Her decades of political experience trump Trump’s experience in the business world, if you can call it that. He duped innocent Americans in his now-defunct Trump University, and you don’t see anyone flying the Trump Shuttle or ordering from Trump Steaks anymore, do you?
All I’m saying is this: Look to the quality of experience, not the quantity, to get a real picture of what someone can do in office.
I’ll vote for a former civil-rights lawyer and community organizer named Barack Obama — or a so-called “career politician” who has championed women’s rights, health care and equality named Hillary Clinton — over a man who thinks his half-century of bankrupted companies, failed business ideas and deliberate deception earns him the highest office in our land any day of the week.
Mia Gettenberg is a UF criminology and law and philosophy junior. Her columns will appear regularly next semester.
