I keep wondering why no one from the Clinton camp claims (just to be consistent) that Laura and Barbara Bush have all this experience that would've made them capable of being the best senators ever. Why is actually working on ground level with normal non-elite-type people (in other words, real Americans) for years and years without much credit and then working with the nitty-gritty of state government not as important as attending bruncheons with gold-rimmed china and flying in private jets and engineering failed health care plans? The math says that Barack has been in government office 4 years longer than Hill. If she denies that state government counts as Experience, she's saying Bill didn't really have enough experience to be president of the US of A.
Of course, I personally count Obama's unsung years of experience as a community organizer as being just as important as his years in Congress, and I'm glad that he does, too. What other candidate has had the generally invisible experience of working in the trenches with a community, for a community? None. That's why they have no clue what its value is--the value of rolling with the punches day in and day out, trying to unify people who think they're enemies, learning step by step to empower a unique group of individuals to find solutions and bring about the change they need for themselves. But really, would it be so risky for us to have a president who actually has lived like a normal American and worked for communities without any other motive than to actually (gasp!) empower a community to bring about change for themselves...all without even looking for a photo op?! Heaven forbid!
Next thing we know, Hillary will be claiming to be the Second Black President of the United States just because she's eaten junkfood and McDonald's with Bill and listened to him playing the sax (you know, since Toni Morrison claimed that those were the prerequisites for being a bona fide black person).
I console myself by assuming that the voices who are regurgitating the whole Experience Mantra have just not had the chance to really hear from Obama beyond the usual sound bytes. (Or sit down and do the math.)
And then there's the whole I Have the Most Foreign Policy Experience contest. Rudy Guiliani already revealed the pointlessness of this dehydrated peeing contest by claiming the title for himself due to his Ground Zero photo ops that put him in close vicinity to the 9-11 terrorists. Perhaps this whole Most Experience thing without the missing, ever-important qualifier (i.e. what kind of Experience?) is just the Wrong Question, period. After all, everyone knows that John McCain has more notches on his belt in terms of years in this category than Hill or Rudy or Barack.
So...new question: Who has the Most ______Experience?
I choose "Insanely Practical" as the qualifier.
Does someone who's only visited other countries in the context of staged tours or talks with a country's elite really know the outside world better than someone who has lived as an integrated foreigner outside the US--and has lots of family members living on other continents?
Here's a little example. My boss recently visited a country I once lived in. It was a staged tour and she met with elite-government types who wanted to give certain impressions of their country. This wasn't at all an invalid experience. In fact, she got more experience than I did within the realm of Powerful People with Agendas--who are also a very real part of the country. This can be genuinely helpful experience. But did she get a broad picture of the public and their worldview or culture? Does she understand how the common person in that country thinks? She'd have to go back for another visit to get a taste of that.
As for me, my experience was limited, too. I was a younger adult then, and I didn't live there long enough to start thinking like the average citizen even though I was immersed in their culture; I was, of course, always going to be a foreigner. But I lived in a non-expat mixed-income neighborhood (the mix all being on the low side)--and had close relationships with my neighbors. I knew what it was like to not enjoy civil liberties that the country claims are given and, while I was a foreigner with more freedoms than others, I had friends who had to deal with human rights abuses on a daily basis. Did my boss see any of that--did this tour allow any of those real life issues to be pondered or understood close-up? We both had limited experience, but I don't think anyone would say, "Oh yeah, your boss' week-long trip gave her a better understanding of the country's culture and needs and worldview."
In this sense, I give Hillary's claims way less credit and Barack's WAY more.
People who are saying to Obama's statement (about his family and his childhood years in Indonesia outranking his senate trips), "Oh puh-leeze, I visited Paris, and that doesn't make me a foreign policy genius" don't get his point only because, like most Americans, they haven't really lived outside the country in an integrated way (i.e. not the same thing as study-abroad, yo.). Having grown up outside America in yet another part of the world, I know that living somewhere before the formative age of ten is absolutely huge in shaping your worldview, and everyone I know who, as a child, has had to be a cultural outsider trying to fit in another culture gets this. (And sorry, being an insulated military dependent doesn't compare to Obama's childhood experience, as has been ignorantly suggested. The kid was in put local schools, for goddness' sake!)
No matter what sort of cultural dissonance you struggle with as a child, your appendages stuck in different worlds like a seemingly impossible Twister pose, you learn to respect people different from you--and learning real respect like this as a child gives you priceless experience that shapes the rest of your life. You learn to recognize that not everyone thinks like you and that they deserve to be understood within their own context--just as you'd want them to try to understand you. For that matter, a Third-Culture Kid's intimate knowledge that more than one valid context (not just your own) actually exists is, in and of itself, experience that a majority of Americans have the luxury of avoiding. But as deceptively simple as this kind of experience may appear to the kind of American that Hillary was shaped to be, we'd all have to agree that this is way more experience than our last few decades of presidents could hope to claim.
At the end of the day, all this talk of Experience alone will continue to be pointless (and weird) unless we--average Americans that we are--start caring more about the missing fill-in-the-blank qualifiers preceding this ever-needful quality. And at the end of the day, the kind of experience we choose in a leader will largely determine what kind of experience we will have of the world outside our borders--and the kind of experience that outside world will have of us.
Posts
