There’s an idea floating out there that President Trump proved “experience” is only marginally important to voters. If that’s true, then who’s to say someone such as Stacey Abrams, with a resume about as thick as Prince William’s hair, should hesitate in feeling qualified to be vice president?
That’s decidedly not what Trump’s winning campaign proved. The only thing it proved is that a certain kind of experience can be more appealing than others.
There’s a reason Trump didn’t begin every public appearance declaring himself a blank slate with no applicable knowledge to national politics. To the contrary, he couldn’t stop bragging about his experience in business and real estate, which he said was critically needed on the presidential level.
“I’ve built a great company,” he said in an interview with the Washington Post back in May 2016. “I have very little debt. My debt-to-asset value is extremely low, as you probably noticed. I’ve built a great company. It’s got great cash flow, tremendous cash flow. I have very little debt, and I have among the best assets in the world.”
At a rally earlier that year, he said, “I’ve built an unbelievable company” with, again, “tremendous cash flow.” He added, “I’ve always been greedy. I love money, right? But, you know what? I want to be greedy for our country.”
There are infinite reasons why any one person might have voted for Trump — they wanted “change”; they liked his position on immigration; they didn’t like Hillary Clinton’s laugh — but his experience as the top executive of a multibillion-dollar business was certainly part of the president’s pitch.
Washington Post blogger Jennifer Rubin may have forgotten most everything she ever knew before 2016, but she at least appears to have retained the knowledge that experience stands for something. She otherwise wouldn’t have dedicated an entire column Wednesday to calling anyone who questions Abrams’s experience — what else? — racist.
“The anger, the determination,” wrote Rubin, “to ignore her accomplishments (she did found a voting rights group, deliver a response to the State of the Union and hold the minority leader position in her state for more than half a decade), the resentment over her insistence on calling out voter suppression as the reason for her loss and feigned offense at her ambition (horrors!) smack of racism.”
Let it be known that filing paperwork to register the name of a nonprofit group and give a speech on TV are now major “accomplishments” on a presidential level, according to Rubin.
Abrams has, of course, done some things. She won a state-level seat in several races, in which she had no opponent. She lost her race for governor. Then, she declined to run for a Senate seat despite Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer urging her to go for it. That all amounts to something.
But experience is not now and never has been something voters aren’t looking at. And if Joe Biden were to choose Abrams as his running mate, they’ll see how unimpressive hers is.
