Originally Posted by TSGracchus

No, I don't agree, because experience in the military below the rank of general or admiral is irrelevant to the duties of president w/r/t national security. We've had very few presidents who came into the office with any national security experience. Let me think. George Washington, Andrew Jackson, Zachary Taylor, Ulysses S. Grant, FDR (sort of), Dwight D. Eisenhower, George H.W. Bush (sort of). (FDR was Assistant Secretary of the Navy, and the elder Bush was briefly CIA director, so they didn't have much experience but they had some.) Nobody else. Some of the most successful foreign-policy leaders in the nation's history had essentially none: Lincoln, for example.

Edit: I forgot Theodore Roosevelt. He was Assistant Secretary of the Navy, too.



Obviously Obama is not more qualified than McCain when it comes to national security in terms of experience. But my point is that neither is McCain more qualified than Obama. Zero equals zero. Obama's youth doesn't make McCain more experienced. It might make Obama better at learning on the job, though.



I'll tell you what it tells me. It tells me that no amount of experience in the House or Senate, and no amount of wartime experience except in the top command, can prepare a person for the realities of top-level diplomacy and national security. Kennedy WAS inexperienced. However, he was not a weakling, and he proved that by handling the Cuban Missile Crisis well enough to prevent a nuclear war. In other words, he learned on the job really fast. Yes, in that meeting with Krushchev, he screwed the pooch. Blame it on his inexperience. We can expect similar flubs from any president without foreign policy experience, which means potentially from either Obama or McCain. Which one is likely to learn faster, though?