In last Monday’s New York Times, economist/columnist Paul Krugman called Hillary Clinton “arguably the best-prepared candidate on matters economic ever to run for president.”
It’s fair to say that this is a debatable proposition.
For our purposes, however, let’s assume Krugman is correct, and Clinton is some combination of Adam Smith, Warren Buffett and the Back to the Future II version of Biff Tannen.
What does that portend for a Clinton presidency?
History tells us, not much.
The notion of what qualifies one for the presidency is amorphous, to say the least. The proof of this?
We have seen spectacularly successful presidencies from those deemed unqualified by the conventional wisdom of their day — Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt were both widely viewed as inconsequential lightweights before taking office.
But even more revealing, in addressing Krugman’s contention, is that some of those almost universally seen as being supremely qualified for the job turned out to be utter failures as president.
No one came to the presidency with a more sparkling resume than John Quincy Adams. The son of a Founder, Adams breathed the rarified air of greatness from his first moments on Earth. He served in the Senate, as a diplomat in multiple foreign assignments and as a successful secretary of state.
It could fairly have been said, had a 19th century Paul Krugman been chronicling his career, that Adams was arguably the best-prepared candidate on matters of foreign policy ever to run for president.
But Adams’ presidency (1825-1829) was marked by a series of missteps, false starts and, in the end, the inability to enact his agenda.
Fast-forward three decades.
If Adams was not the most well-credentialed man ever to be elected president, it’s because James Buchanan bested him.
The Pennsylvanian, who started out life as a Federalist, became a Democrat, served in the state legislature, the U.S. House and the Senate. Like Adams, he was ambassador to Russia and Great Britain and presided over a successful term as secretary of state.
Unlike Adams, who lost his Massachusetts Senate seat when he defied local Federalist sentiment on an embargo of British goods, Buchanan even had the good sense to be out of the country when hotly contested political debates on the Compromise of 1850 and the Kansas-Nebraska Act were dashing others’ careers.
Buchanan not only had a great resume, he had good timing.
None of it saved him as president (1857-1861), when his vacillation and uncertainty led inexorably toward secession and civil war.
Clinton hopes to become the first former secretary of state to become president since Buchanan. And, like him, she is hoping to ride a credential-filled resume into office.
Then what?
Krugman concedes that Clinton, despite her qualifications, “could nonetheless mess up — but ignorance won’t be the reason.”
But ignorance is rarely, if ever, the reason a presidential administration runs off the rails. Hubris, bad planning or unfortunate circumstance all rank well ahead of ignorance.
Although Krugman and many like him are loathe to admit such a thing, we’ve been pretty lucky. No U.S. president has ever been elected who was broadly “ignorant,” in any sense that the term has meaning. When the dissatisfied complain about a president’s ignorance, what they really mean is that he did things they didn’t like.
No one knows what qualifies a person to be president, not even a Nobel Prize-winning economist. We can judge such competence only in hindsight, usually in distant hindsight.
Does being a successful military commander qualify you? George Washington, Andrew Jackson and Dwight Eisenhower would seem to imply yes. Zachary Taylor and Ulysses Grant might argue in the negative.
How about a record of legislative accomplishment? Ask Henry Clay, perhaps the greatest legislator in American history. He ran for president three times and lost. James Madison succeeded at both.
There simply are no qualifications that guarantee success — nothing in any walk of life is preparatory for the immense responsibilities of the office.
Certainly, history has shown us time and again that “the best-prepared candidate” does not always lead to the most-successful presidency.
John Bicknell is executive editor of Watchdog.org and author of “America 1844: Religious Fervor, Westward Expansion and the Presidential Election That Transformed the Nation.” He is writing a book about the 1856 presidential campaign. Thinking of submitting an op-ed to the Washington Examiner? Be sure to read our guidelines on submissions.
