Experience

Ari makes a good point:

And furthermore, circling back to and expanding upon Wes Clark’s original point about experience, history is agnostic on whether great warriors make great presidents. In the “yea” column you’ll find George Washington. Because I’m feeling generous . . . . I’ll throw in Teddy Roosevelt. And if you insist that I expand the column to include borderline cases, we could also talk about Andrew Jackson, Harry Truman, and Ike. The “nay” column is far longer, so I’ll just hit the highlights: Zachary Taylor, U.S. Grant, Rutherford Hayes, James Garfield, Benjamin Harrison, William McKinley, John Kennedy, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, George H.W. Bush, and, of course, George W. Bush.

I would certainly add the execrable Franklin Pierce, who — along with the hapless Winfield Scott — collaborated to make the election of 1852 one of, of not the, most awful presidential campaigns in American history. Pierce and Scott were nominated by their respective parties solely on the basis of their service in theMexican War. Scott, the Whig candidate, was a Whig only by virtue of his private (though widely surmised) opposition to slavery; indeed, he had apparently never voted in his life, which proved to be a unique advantage to the Whigs, who were unsuccesslly trying to avoid any national conversation about slavery. Pierce, though a Democrat, nourished his inner plantation master by supporting his Southern colleagues in their hopes of extending the rights to human property as far as the eye could see. The election was as awful in reality as it appeared on paper.

The Mexican War offered both candidates a seemingly non-partisan — and ultimately meaningless — basis for claiming a right to national leadership. At the time, the war had been pitched as a great sectional unifier, an expansionist war that — coupled with the acquisition of Oregon — would ease the growing political, economic and cultural distance between North and South. Over the next decade, however, the Mexican War evolved into a symbol of Southern expansionism — a war that gave the South the terrain it needed to rejuvenate itself. With Peirce as President, this view of the Mexican War would become all the clearer as the New Hampshire Democrat presided over the repeal of the Missouri Compromise and an utterly disastrous, pro-slavery foreign policy that sought to acquire Cuba.

Pierce was also the recipient of one of the worst gestures of 19th century literary hackery, when Nathaniel Hawthorne — an old college friend of his — wrote his campaign biography for him.