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Nick Kristoff at the NY Times has an interesting column out where he details the role of experience in picking our president since 1900. Which president does this describe?

With all the sniping from the Clinton camp about whether Barack Obama has enough experience to make a strong president, consider another presidential candidate who was far more of a novice. He had the gall to run for president even though he had served a single undistinguished term in the House of Representatives, before being hounded back to his district.

Answer: Abraham Lincoln.

He then goes on to compare the experience level of some of our greatest presidents of the 20th century with some of our duds. Who comes out on top?

Looking at the 19 presidents since 1900, three of the greatest were among those with the fewest years in electoral politics. Teddy Roosevelt had been a governor for two years and vice president for six months; Woodrow Wilson, a governor for just two years; and Franklin Roosevelt, a governor for four years. None ever served in Congress.

Those with the most experience?

Alternatively, look at the five presidents since 1900 with perhaps the most political experience when taking office: William McKinley, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford and George H. W. Bush. They had great technical skills — but not one was among our very greatest presidents.

Which brings us to Obama vs. Hillary in the experience debate. Kristoff details the difference between the two, but this seems to be an attribute that has not received enough attention:

Then there's Mr. Obama's grade-school years in Indonesia. Our most serious mistakes in foreign policy, from Vietnam to Iraq, have been a blindness to other people's nationalism and an inability to see ourselves as others see us. Mr. Obama seems to have absorbed an intuitive sensitivity to that problem.

Until you travel outside of the United States, you really don't have a grasp of how the rest of the world sees us. In fact, one of the reasons for Bush's many foreign policy failures must lie in the fact that the man had traveled outside of the US only once before he was elected president. How empathetic can you be when you've never dealt personally with someone with a funny accent?

Yes, Hillary has been closer to "the action" considering her eight years in her husband's White House, but is that the kind of experience needed to make a great president? If we were to choose the man with the most experience, Joe Biden, Chris Dodd, and Bill Richardson would still be in the race. Or as Kristoff states:

To put it another way, think which politician is most experienced today in the classic sense, and thus - according to the "experience" camp - best qualified to become the next president.

That's Dick Cheney. And I rest my case.

Indeedy...

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