Re: Ben Carson forms presidential exploratory committee
So just being a politician gives you experience to be President? Hmm....
Simply being a politician? No. Being and serving as an elected official in a political/governmental role however is direct experience related to the job of the Presidency.
As I've said
repeatedly over the past 6+ years...
It is almost universally held amongst political scientists that Executive Experience in government is by far the most direct and relevant experience for the Presidency. IE a Vice Presidency, Governorship, or to a lesser extend a Vice Governorship or Mayor of a substantially sized city (ala New York). This is because of the near direct 1:1 relationship between the two jobs, with it simply being a difference in magnitude.
The one caveat between this and the next set of experience is a significantly high officer in the military during an election period where national defense is at a significant level of interest. Similar to being an executive in government being directly related to being the Chief Executive of the US, being a top tier military leader is directly related to being the Commander in Chief and is also viewed as absolute direct experience.
The next teir to this is federal legislative experience. While this does not give you direct experience with the duties and responsabilities of an executive, it does provide you with a significant amount of experience with the governmental process on the national level, involves you with almost every policy issue that you're likely to be dealing with in the role as President, and depending on your committees may give you direct experience with various avenues of the Executives jobs such as foreign policy. In terms of legislative experience, Senatorial experience has historically been viewed as significantly more valuable than House experience when it comes to the Presdiency.
Much like the a high ranking military commander is a pseudo "1b" to executive experience, high level cabinet positions fall in as a sort of "2c" behind Senate and House experience typically. Specifically speaking of a position like Secretary of State. This is something that's viewed as giving you some executive experience as well as general federal experience as well.
Those are generally what's historically been viewed as your Primary and Secondary tier experience for the Presidency of the United States. The teriary level would be lower state offices (like a state Senator), lesser viewed cabinet positions (like Energy Secretary for example), or executive experience in the private sector for an exceedingly large organization/business.
Never has a President
ever been elected in this country who's levels of experience reside singularly in the teriary layer. I haven't fully done the research again recently, but I'd dare say no candidate for either of the two major political parties in this country in the past 75 years has had experience that resides singularly in the teriary layer either.
Ben Carson does not even have anything that could reliably be described in this third layer of experience. The closest thing he could claim is being director of pediatric neurosurgery at John Hopkins...essentially the executive of a subset of a subset of a hospital. It is experience related to running the country like saying putting together legos is experience for creating a sky scraper.
Now, is experience everything? Absolutely not. We've had greatly experienced individuals who have failed, we've had somewhat lacking experienced individuals do well. But in general, those who are more experienced have done better, and as it relates to electability....experience is almost always viewed as an important factor in the electorate.
Experience was important to me in 2008, and it's important to me now. It's not something I'm going to simply ignore because someone speaks prettily about things that are in line with my ideology. If it was, then it'd show my issues with Obama's experience in 2008 was just utter and complete bull****, simply a fabrication created simply out of usefulness as a means of attacking him due to my ideological differences with him.