Pin the Tail

Today’s Washington Post features a withering op-ed by George Will called “Playing the ‘Fair’ Card” in which Will highlights an instance from U.S. history when “experience” doesn’t, or didn’t, count for much—his op-ed is written in light of the increasingly desperate sound of the Hillary Clinton contingency who, as Will describes, keep up “constant invocations of her ‘35 years’ of experience…” (Will also touches upon the pesky matter of the superdelegates in his op-ed column.)

Will illustrates an instance from U.S. history where a candidate with vast “experience” assumed the Presidency:

The president who came to office with the most glittering array of experiences had served 10 years in the House of Representatives, then became minister to Russia, then served 10 years in the Senate, then four years as secretary of state (during a war that enlarged the nation by 33 percent), then was minister to Britain. Then, in 1856, James Buchanan was elected president and in just one term secured a strong claim to being ranked as America’s worst president. Abraham Lincoln, the inexperienced former one-term congressman, had an easy act to follow.

The op-ed led me to another profile by writer Sean Wilentz, who opined about “The Worst President in History” for Rolling Stone…he described Buchanan as “dithering.”

Dithering officials…everyone’s familiar with those types—especially at the local level.

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Tonight there is a Plan Commission Work Session.

The Regular Session of the Plan Commission will take place next Tuesday, beginning at 6pm.

(These February Plan Commission meetings are irregular times; we’ll be back to the usual schedule next month.)

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 21st, 2008 at 7:30 am and is filed under Candidates, Justice. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.