Michele Bachmann explains why she is qualified to be president:
“I have a very broad, extensive background.
I’m a student of many years. I’ve studied a number of, a wide berth of topics. I sit currently on the Intelligence Committee. We deal with the classified secrets and with the unrest that’s occurring around the world. I also sit on Financial Services Committee.
But again, I’ve lived life.
Tomorrow, I’ll be celebrating my 55th birthday, and I’ve had a wide, extensive life. And again, my background is a very practical, solution-oriented vision.”
I’m not much interested in Bachmann’s presidential aspirations because I don’t take them seriously. But I am interested in the right’s bizarrely low expectations for what constitutes qualification for our highest offices. They gave us Dan Quayle. They gave us George W. Bush. They tried to give us Sarah Palin. I don’t want to sound elitist, but we should demand more experience than these candidates had when they served (or attempted to serve) as our top leaders.
Since Bachmann is talking about running for president, it’s natural to ask her what makes her qualified for the position. She did mention that she sits on the House Intelligence and Financial Services committees. Those positions do constitute relevant experience, although she’s only been serving on the Intelligence Committee for a couple of months. But the rest of her Palinesque response is meaningless. We have all lived life. We have all had experiences. Bachmann should have talked about what kinds of experiences she’s had that set her apart. For example, according to her Wikipedia entry, she worked for a time on a kibbutz in Israel. That’s a unique and unusual experience. She lived abroad in a much different culture. Inevitably, that provided her some important perspective that allows her to imagine different systems and different ways of doing things.
Bachmann could also talk about her multiple degrees, including law degrees from Oral Roberts University and William & Mary. She could talk about her time working as an attorney the commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service, and why she quit to become a full-time mother.
I’m not saying that she’s qualified to be president, but she could make a stronger case than that she’s lived life, had experiences, and studied an unspecified number (berth) of topics. Maybe academic achievements and travel abroad don’t count as qualifications among the hard-right base of the Republican Party, but isn’t that the problem?
Sarah Palin probably had fewer credentials than Bachmann when she was tapped as McCain’s running mate. She had barely served as governor for a year; her formal education was less impressive; her knowledge of the larger world was inferior, and her familiarity with Washington DC and Congress was virtually non-existent.
I think the question we need to ask is, without being elitist about it, what are the minimum qualifications we should demand from a candidate for high office? It’s not an easy question to answer precisely. Some candidates suffer from too little familiarity with how Washington works, while others are too captured by the Washington mindset to think outside the box. But one thing that we have a right to ask is that candidates be uniquely superlative in some areas of life. They should be high achievers. They don’t need to have an Ivy League degree or be a highly successful CEO, but they should have excelled at something at some recent point in their life. Another thing we should ask is that they have a solid understanding of history and current events, including especially of foreign cultures, history, and events. Such experience can be academic or diplomatic or governmental or business-oriented, but it should exist.
I think people on the left automatically judge candidates by this kind of criteria without having to be self-conscious about it. But people on the right seem to be very suspicious of people with too much in the way of academic accomplishment, or who have traveled extensively and think other countries have something to teach us about our options for governing our own affairs. That’s probably why Bachmann didn’t have much to say in her own defense. The people who might be impressed by her degrees might look down on the colleges she attended rather than credit her for rising up from modest means to make something of herself. And her true base? They value her ordinary averageness, her stay-at-mom traditional values, and her anti-abortion activism, not her educational attainment.
I’m not immune from anti-elitist feelings. I criticized Obama for staffing his administration with almost exclusively Ivy League/Stanford/Berkeley graduates. Not everyone blossoms in high school and gets accepted to those kinds of universities. Not everyone can afford those kind of universities. I’d like to see more jobs for people who graduated from Michigan State or Rutgers or the University of Georgia. But anti-elitism shouldn’t extend to a celebration of low achievement. Our leaders should be very accomplished, intelligent people. You just couldn’t say that about Quayle, Bush, or Palin. The former two were just weaker knock-offs of their accomplished fathers who never took the life of the mind seriously. Palin just wasn’t qualified on any level. And Bachmann? Someone with her experience could be qualified, but it would help if they weren’t crazy.
