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From the liberal-sided Huffington Post.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/earl-o...-_b_88296.html

Despite JFK's years of public policy experience and political acumen, that Obama can't match, he was still woefully ill-equipped to deal with the two biggest crises that confronted his administration; the Cuban Missile crisis and the civil rights crisis. The mythmakers have spun a picture of a cool, calm, and collected JFK facing down Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev in 1962. He allegedly forced him to get Russian missiles out of Cuba and that saved the world from nuclear destruction.

Then there's the issue of civil rights. The Obama camp twisted and mangled an innocent comment Clinton made in which she praised President Lyndon Baines Johnson for driving the 1964 civil rights bill through Congress. Supposedly Clinton defamed Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. by minimizing his role in getting a civil rights law. Clinton, of course, got it right. It took every bit of Johnson's relentless political arm twisting, cajoling, and deal-making skills to get wavering Republicans and hostile Southern Senators who controlled key committees to back the bill or soften their vehement opposition to it.


The bill though was not Johnson's. It was introduced by Kennedy. Despite his efforts, Kennedy could not budge Congress to take action. JFK simply did not have the political muscle to budge the bill's opponents. Johnson did have the experience and the muscle to ultimately force passage.
The rap against Obama that he lacks the requisite experience to get the job done effectively in the White House is not a cheap and meaningless campaign shot at him.



The American presidency should not be an OJT position. Voters shouldn't be asked to make a leap of faith that an untested candidate can smoothly and effortlessly handle crisis situations that inevitably arise. Inexperienced presidents are poor crisis managers. They get us into costly and unpopular wars and brush fire conflicts. They alienate foreign friends and allies. They bungle the economy. And their administrations more times than not are riddled with corruption and cronyism. The disastrous proof is the administration of the man that Obama seeks to replace.

Even without fingering Bush's foreign and domestic policy bumbles and ineptitude, the presidents that have been most successful in recent decades have been FDR, Bill Clinton and Dwight Eisenhower. They had two things in common. They had extensive executive and administrative experience either as governors, or in the case of Eisenhower, in the armed forces before they became president.


The lack of administrative and crisis management experience shouldn't disqualify a prospective presidential candidate, or mean that he or she will crumble under fire. At the same time, their inexperience raises a giant question mark about the candidate. That can't be cavalierly dismissed.

Truly the man Obama wants to compare himself too.