Are You Experienced?
A few months ago I looked at terms like “pushback,” “ties” and “misspoke,” proposing ways that these colorful words could be used more responsibly in election commentary. Now that the endgame is approaching, I thought I’d start an occasional series in a similar spirit, showing how a few keywords are structuring arguments, hoping to highlight instances in which language choices are obfuscating the contest, as well as proposing possible remedies to demystify the discussion, should anyone actually wish to do so.
Maybe it’s a lost cause to ask for responsibility in political talk, but that’s what makes it righteous.
My first target is “experience,” which has become central to the character debate since Gov. Sarah Palin has joined the contest and her limited background has been called into question, particularly in light of the contrast that John McCain has drawn between himself and Barack Obama on this score. So what do we mean by “experience” in this context? The relevant definition is the eighth in the Oxford English Dictionary:
The state of having been occupied in any department of study or practice, in affairs generally, or in the intercourse of life; the extent to which, or the length of time during which, one has been so occupied; the aptitudes, skill, judgement, etc. thereby acquired.
Yuck. No wonder we have such trouble with usage. Here I’d like to highlight just two problems that seem to come up often.
First off, there is a tension between the language of duration (“extent” “length”) and the language of learning (“aptitudes” “skill”). It’s like experience is a quality masquerading as a quantity. Of course, in reality, the sheer duration of office is nothing compared with the characteristics of one’s “study or practice” and the tests undergone therein. This is not exactly a big secret. A few weeks of leading in combat can contain more lessons for a soldier than ten years behind a desk. In any career, some experiences are simply more rich, rewarding and instructive than others. If you don’t believe me, look at your own resume.
Also, since the argument is inevitably framed quantitatively, a second problem emerges: because of the variety of forms of public service in modern life, there is no common-sense metric with which to measure two contrasting careers in it. Does community organizing count? What about founding a business? What is the difference between legislative and executive types of experience? Are Senate Committee Chairs more experienced than other members? How many experience points go to the PTA member and how many go to the POW?
So long as questions like these remain ill-defined – and they always do – debates can be endless and questions unanswerable. It is interesting that many large employers have innovated mechanisms in their hiring processes to reduce this heterogeneity (point systems, thresholds, rankings of institutions and competitors), thereby making it possible to roughly calculate differing sets of experience against one another. But there is no such process in the public mind, and this dearth allows for ill-shaped debates that are extremely circuitous.
For both of these reasons, the experience argument is usually misleading, something that people use to muddy a contrast rather than sharpen it.
That said, there is a common denominator that might help. Since we live in a democracy, no matter what office you’ve held – Governor, District Water Board Chair or Dog-Catcher – the odds are that you had to earn somebody’s vote to get it. How about measuring experience by tallying up the number of votes that each candidate has actually earned over their careers in public life? We know that Obama has earned more than 18 million this year alone. No doubt Biden and McCain each have tens of millions over their long careers. Palin? A little over 100,000 sheer votes, according to the Tribune. That’s not as much, but it is more than the dog-catcher, anyway.
Sure, it’s not a definitive statistic. Experience is difficult to express succinctly, and it is usually cited by disingenuous people who claim that experience is crucial, then refuse to give us the tools we need to ascertain it adequately. Still, in our system of government, votes remain a fundamental measure of earned public confidence – the soup to nuts of all officeholding – and they can’t be much lousier as a measure of experience than the approaches that characterize this issue currently. At the very least, this measure would remind us that while experience in business, military affairs or public service is laudable, at the end of the day it is experience in politics that matters in politics, just as it is experience in dentistry that matters in dentistry.
Fancy that.
