The 16-Year Itch
Voters seem unusually willing this year to entertain candidates lacking in Washington experience.
BY MICHAEL BARONE
OpinionJournal.com
The Iowa caucuses have just passed and we await, with just two weekday prime-time news nights in between, the New Hampshire primary. The biggest surprise of the campaign so far is the success of candidates with minimal credentials and little if any experience in national governance.
The Wall Street Journal went to press before the results in Iowa were in, but Mike Huckabee, former governor of Arkansas, and Mitt Romney, a one-term governor of Massachusetts, were leading in Iowa Republican polls. Barack Obama, in his fourth year in the Senate, was running strong in the Democratic contest, as was John Edwards, who spent just one term in the Senate and has now been running for president or vice president for six years.
Even Hillary Clinton, campaigning as the candidate with experience, has limited credentials. She has some experience with the pressures of the White House and has taken some initiative on domestic policy, with mixed results. But as Patrick Healy of the New York Times pointed out recently, she never held a security clearance during her husband's presidency, and last week she was under the impression that Pervez Musharraf was running in parliamentary elections in Pakistan, although he was elected president in October.
New Hampshire may give us different results, and there is no guarantee that any of the top finishers in Iowa will be nominated, much less win the presidency. But what we are seeing this year is an unusual preference for outside-the-system candidates with less top-level experience than voters usually want in a president.
BY MICHAEL BARONE
OpinionJournal.com
The Iowa caucuses have just passed and we await, with just two weekday prime-time news nights in between, the New Hampshire primary. The biggest surprise of the campaign so far is the success of candidates with minimal credentials and little if any experience in national governance.
The Wall Street Journal went to press before the results in Iowa were in, but Mike Huckabee, former governor of Arkansas, and Mitt Romney, a one-term governor of Massachusetts, were leading in Iowa Republican polls. Barack Obama, in his fourth year in the Senate, was running strong in the Democratic contest, as was John Edwards, who spent just one term in the Senate and has now been running for president or vice president for six years.
Even Hillary Clinton, campaigning as the candidate with experience, has limited credentials. She has some experience with the pressures of the White House and has taken some initiative on domestic policy, with mixed results. But as Patrick Healy of the New York Times pointed out recently, she never held a security clearance during her husband's presidency, and last week she was under the impression that Pervez Musharraf was running in parliamentary elections in Pakistan, although he was elected president in October.
New Hampshire may give us different results, and there is no guarantee that any of the top finishers in Iowa will be nominated, much less win the presidency. But what we are seeing this year is an unusual preference for outside-the-system candidates with less top-level experience than voters usually want in a president.
posted by Andy W. Rogers | 10:52 AM
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