Legal Commentary

I'd like to thank Dan M and the rest of the PB crew for having me back again. For those of you who don't know who I am (most of you, most likely), I'm an associate professor of economics at the University of Arizona. I'm very interested in law and in law & economics, though I don't have any formal legal training. I'll try to be clear in my posts about what I know and when I'm speculating/wondering. I should also note that, in addition to blogging here for the month, I'm also an occasional contributor to the Economists For Obama blog. Check it out if you're interested

We've heard a lot in this presidential election campaign about experience. Hillary Clinton said she had 35 years of it, John McCain's supporters say he has more than anyone elsee in galactic history, and both of them have at various times slammed Barack Obama (my guy, to be clear) for supposedly not having enough. Obama's response has regularly been that what matters is judgment, which of course he says he's got and McCain doesn't. Anyone with the most basic sense of politics would tell you that this is the obvious retort, and frame, for Obama to use, so no one should be surprised that he's doing so.

I happen to agree that judgment, rather than experience per se, is the more important issue. If you're not convinced on that point, then Sarah Palin would like to sell you on a bridge to nowhere. Maybe I'll write more about the distinction later, but for this post, I want to focus on why the argument about Obama's experience is wrong-headed.

Let me start by digressing. It happens that, in terms of academic achievement, professional acclaim, and so on, Paul Krugman is one of the leading international trade economists of his time, and also a top  macroeconomist (health and tax policy, about which he writes frequently, were never his academic focus, but I digress from my digression). As an economist who does applied research on a variety of public-policy issues, I frequently run into other economists who say something like this:

I was really happy when Paul Krugman started writing a column for the New York Times, but I really wish he would stick to what he knows, economics, instead of spending so much time talking about politics. At least he's qualified to write about economics.

Got that? Krugman's a professional economist, so while he's qualified to write about economics, he's out of his league when it comes to politics. And the people saying this are....other economists. So how do they know he's not qualified to write about politics? If no economist is qualified to do so, how does any economist know that no economist is? Now, this argument isn't fallacious -- after all, I'm quite certain that I'm unqualified to serve as chief physicist of U.S. nuclear weapons research, because I don't know very much at all about nuclear weapons (or even physics in general). In other words, I'm sensible enough to know that there are whole topics about which I'm just ignorant. But politics isn't like that: you read some stuff about current events, you pay attention to what politicians and their staffs say, and you're in business. It ain't rocket science. And anyone who says you're not qualified because you're like them is....probably not qualified to critique your knowledge of politics.

Back to Obama.

On what basis do all of Obama's critics claim he lacks experience? Best as I can tell, the point was that Obama hasn't held federal office long enough. Now that Sarah Palin's on the GOP ticket, Obama's supposed deficit to her in executive experience is the new talking point, and it is true that he has never been mayor of a town of between 6000-9000 people or governor of Alaska.

Got that? Too little federal/executive experience makes Barack Obama unqualified, or maybe just suspect. Why is this true? Perhaps people learn critical things about being president by being mayor, or Senator for a really long time (John Kerry, are you reading this??), or Governor of Alaska (heaven forbid being a Senator from Alaska were critical -- we'd have a Mike Gravel-Ted Stevens cage match for the Oval Office). Without this experience, I guess, no one would be qualified to be President.

If you think these claims are true, or plausible, then it's epistemological quiz time: How do you know that these claims are true, or plausible? Have you ever been a small-town mayor? Or a multi-term Senator? Or Governor of Alaska? If so, you're excused from answering the quiz. But if you lack these critical qualities in a President, how do you know that they are indeed critical? You could say that you know because you know the things you don't know, like my rocket-science example. But then it seems to me you're arguing that you lack the experience necessary to express a worthy opinion on almost every major public policy issue. Don't tell me about what to do about Iraq, or Georgia, or tax policy: if Barack Obama doesn't have the experience to know, then neither do you.

From what I can tell, what it takes to be a good president is a lot less like being a nuclear physicist than it is like being a good analyst of politics and policy. If you get informed about and pay attention to the issues that matter, you're at least in the game. Obviously there's a lot more that matters (here's where I'd talk about judgment if I were going to). But besides judgment and a decent sense for how to thread political needles, if the comparison between the Bush and Clinton administrations has taught us anything, it's that simply being interested in the reality-based aspects of governing is a big part of the job. Whatever you think about Obama, it's been clear (at least) since he entered the Senate that he possesses that quality. What scares me about Sarah Palin is that, so far, there is precious little reason to think she does. And if John McCain can't see that, then what does that say about the value of his own vaunted experience?

If you still think that checking off more years in the Senate, as a mayor of a few thousand people, or Governor of Alaska is a critical part of being qualified -- having the experience -- to be President, fine. But don't tell anyone, because you don't have the experience for that job.