Sound bites
Barack Obama led the Wonkosphere yesterday with almost 25% buzzshare. Much of the discussion revolved around the Obama campaign announcement that he would limit his appearances in debates over the next several months to those sponsored by the DNC.
The Obama campaign stated that in order to give adequate coverage to early states, they needed more flexibility in their schedule. MyDD suggests a different reason: “The debates have not been a format in which Obama either feels comfortable or has been able to gain traction; he admits this himself…You can’t blame the Obama campaign for making the break, debates were obviously not Obama’s forte, and have only served to open him up to attacks by the Senator trio of Clinton-Dodd-Biden, as being unexperienced.”
As MyDD also notes, the grassroots odds on Obama have also plunged in the last several weeks after a series of high profile Obama quotes. Everyone’s attacking Obama’s experience.
My sense is that when candidates and pundits and eventually voters talk about “experience”, it is not pure-resume experience they are referring to. Bill Richardson has a broader experience base than any of the other Democratic candidates, but that alone is not giving him 10 free points in popularity. The fact that governors can get elected president (Carter, Clinton, Bush) while Senators cannot also argues against the absolute need for resume experience.
Rather, I think experience in the political realm is more about acting and responding in a way befitting of the office, i.e. acting “presidential”. Hillary Clinton and Rudy Giulinai are perceived as experienced not only because of their resume, but because they don’t make verbal mistakes, they are prepared, they can handle surprises, and they know when to come across with either a soft or hard ego.
In Politics 2.0 experience is as much about predictability and stability as it is about what one did in the past.
