143 days
By Jennifer J. Foster
Published: May 23, 2008
GOPUSA’s Cheri Jacobus made this point in a recent blog post:
From the time Barack Obama was sworn in as a United State Senator, to the time he announced he was forming a Presidential exploratory committee, he logged 143 days of experience in the Senate. That’s how many days the Senate was actually in session and working.
After 143 days of work experience, Obama believed he was ready to be Commander In Chief, Leader of the Free World, and fill the shoes of Abraham Lincoln, FDR, JFK and Ronald Reagan.
143 days—I keep leftovers in my refrigerator longer than that.
Jacobus then goes on to preview a juxtaposition we’re likely to see a lot in coming months: John McCain has spent 26 years in Congress and 22 years in the military—1,966 days of which were spent as a prisoner of war in Hanoi.
This is how McCain will respond to Obama’s charge that McCain is a Washington insider and therefore incapable of sparking the kind of change this country wants.
On the flip side, what McCain will paint as a shocking lack of experience—Obama’s 143 days in the Senate—Obama will spin as proof that he hasn’t been in Washington long enough to become “one of them.“
Who do you think has the better argument? And to that question, what is the dividing line between having a decent amount of experience and being a “Washington insider?“ How would you counsel the candidates to handle the experience issue?
P.S. In the unlikely event that I’m ever invited to Cheri Jacobus’ house for dinnner, I’m not eating anything out of her refrigerator.
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Posted by ( ) on May 23, 2008 at 4:51 pm
I’m not so concerned with who has the better argument.
McCain certainly has more experience, but being inside the beltway for so long could be a negative as far as I’m concerned because people seem to pick up bad habits there. Also, his record is mixed and not really consistently conservative as a Republican’s should be.
The thing about Obama is that what little congressional experience he has seems to be based on his lifetime experiences which appear to have made him even more of a socialist than even Hillary Clinton, as well as a supporter of a Muslim agenda. The best thing I can say for him is that he seems to be like a rock star to his admirers.
I can’t bring myself to vote for McCain, Obama, or Hillary if she should find some way to win the nomination at the Democratic convention, but I will cast a vote in November for someone to become our next president.
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