(11-01-2016 05:03 PM)georgewebb Wrote:  

(11-01-2016 04:40 PM)ColOwl Wrote:  

(11-01-2016 03:46 PM)georgewebb Wrote:  

(11-01-2016 03:39 PM)ColOwl Wrote:  The last person elected to the Presidency with more 'business' experience than elective office responsibility was Herbert Hoover (professional engineer & Secretary of Commerce for about 7 years), and we all know how that turned out! At least Reagan and Romney took their celebrity and business experience to a major state house before reaching for the highest and most demanding office in the world.

It is very astute to observe that experience with political responsibility is important. The failure to appreciate that in 2008 and 2012 is one of the reasons we got stuck with the current President.

Neither a good analogy nor a good interpretation of what I said.

Actually, it's a good analogy and a good interpretation of what you said.

(11-01-2016 04:40 PM)ColOwl Wrote:  And I doubt that you really want to pit President Obama's 12 years of experience as a state legislator and U.S. Senator (I assume you would claim would be non-qualifying) against, let's say, President George W. Bush's five years of experience as Governor of Texas (which I assume you would claim would be qualifying). As ineffective a Governor as W was in a state where that office is less powerful than that of the Lieutenant Governor as President of the Senate (one of the weakest of the 50 states!), the best you'd get, arguably, would be a tie.

You are wrong. Most political observers would view five years of experience as a governor as greater experience of real political responsibility than a dozen years of ideological and mostly absent service as a legislator. Even candidate Obama didn't claim to be experienced.

(11-01-2016 04:40 PM)ColOwl Wrote:  So since Obama has been President for eight years, by your definition he's "responsible" for...

I gave no such definition, and it's not clear how you could plausibly think that I did.

(11-01-2016 04:40 PM)ColOwl Wrote:  ... unemployment dropping from 10% to 4.9%, for uninsured adults dropping from 18% to 11.9%, for U.S.-made cars sold increasing from 10.4M to 17.5M, for consumer confidence increasing from 37.7 to 104.1, just to name a few. I'll have another helping of that flavor of 'political responsibility,' please!

Thank you.

Your comment is cute, but the relevant question is not whether certain statistics correlate with an office-holder's chronological term, but what are the caused results of the office-holder's actual initiatives. The American economy is both robust and cyclical, and most reasonable observers agree that saying particular indicators were "caused" by the occupant of the White House is nearly impossible. It is fair to say that some economic measures have gotten better and some have gotten worse; that in each category, it is not clear which have done so because of, in spite of, or independently of his presidency; and that some would no doubt have improved (or fallen) even more had he not been president. It is also possible that you are not a reasonable observer, as the comment in another post equating "people who distrust Hillary Clinton" with "steady consumers of Fox News factoids" tends to demonstrate.

Lastly, as noted in an edit my original post, your historical premise is false: Eisenhower served as President for eight years without previously having had elective office of any kind. Hoover was not the most recent, nor clearly representative.


Thank you. Cheers.

I agree with the logic in the first bolded part- but then doesn't that mean that the same would be said for many, if not all, of the negatives that you'd like to ascribe to Obama's time as POTUS?

For the second, I think you intentionally missed a very important part of what ColOwl said. He did not say that Hoover was the last person who did not previously hold elected office, but rather that he was the last person with more 'business experience' than elective office responsibility. Eisenhower had NO business experience before he became president and went straight into the military from West Point. The closest he came to having a job in "business" was being the President of Columbia for about 1 year, which he quit to become the Supreme Commander of NATO. So I doubt business acumen was one of his selling points.

Digging a bit more into Eisenhower's past, he was appointed the Military Governor of the US Occupation Zone in Germany, which I have to imagine is very similar to being elected.

Anyways, point being, I think you're stretching a bit here.