Why "experience" was the wrong meme.

Ugh, I just used the word "meme."

Anyway, aside from the conventional wisdom that this is a "change" election and that's why Hillary Clinton didn't do better, there's another reason that I find the "experience" claim problematic--and it's got nothing to do with questioning the actual level of experience.

As Latoya at Racialicious noted, many of us younger people have been told we can't do something because we're too young. I'm 28 and look younger than I am, and when I was the manager of a large retail/rental bike shop, I constantly had to deal with people walking past me to look for "the person in charge." When I had employees that were older than I was, I watched older customers consistently address them rather than me.

This gets worse, of course, when you're a woman, and/or a person of color. Often you'll be the first to do something, and you won't have had the opportunities for "experience" that white men have.

Making the argument for Hillary Clinton one based on "experience," as Gloria Steinem did, makes the argument not one that opens doors for all woman candidates, but opens doors for Hillary Clinton, because she can claim a very specific type of experience that only a few other women have--being married to the President.

Because Hillary Clinton's "experience" that makes her "ready on day one" was not predicated upon her work as a lawyer or even really on her work in the Senate, but on her time as first lady doing diplomatic missions and the like, this doesn't help the argument for any others who may come behind her.

We don't want to argue that only women who have watched their husbands do something first are qualified. We don't want to argue that women can only be president when they're more "experienced" than the other candidates.

We want to argue that women can be president because they're smart, have good policy ideas, and good judgment, not because they've served more time. Because most women in politics have served less time than the men. Most people of color have less time in politics than most white people. There are men in the Senate who were there when the Civil Rights movement happened, who were there when the "second wave" (see this link for some real dirt on the real "waves") of the women's movement happened and when women and people of color first started to get into positions of political power.

We haven't had the opportunity to have as much experience. We have to fight to change that. Which means not more people with "experience," because that claim is always going to favor the Ted Kennedys and Strom Thurmonds of this world. It means more new voices, more voices that have been historically excluded, more voices that do not have experience but have something more valid to consider: a different perspective.

Hillary Clinton could have chosen this path to the white house, and who knows? It may have gone better for her. Clearly, the swift falls of Joe Biden, Chris Dodd, and my favorite, Bill Richardson showed that Democrats weren't looking for experience. Yet the argument that I met on the campaign trail when people were voting for Clinton was constantly "She's more experienced." When you scratched it, though, they couldn't tell you what experience specifically mattered to them, and it became clear that a lot of the time, "experience" meant name recognition, not any specific things that she'd done that made her more qualified.

And we certainly don't want to go there, do we? Name recognition is still going to be harder for female politicians and politicians of color. Quick, name five Senators. Aside from Senator Clinton, how many people would name women? Who has higher name recognition, Teddy Kennedy or Barbara Mikulski? Joe Lieberman or Patty Murray? Harry Reid or Olympia Snowe?

Hopefully, it won't always be that way. But for now, experience favors those who have been in power the longest. It is not the path to more women CEOs, more women Senators, more women governors. There is no other woman besides Hillary Clinton who can claim that she has the "experience" to be ready to be president "on day one."

But there are a lot of women and people of color who have the smarts, the ideas, and the judgment to do so, and that's what we should be basing our arguments on.


(cross-posted, as usual.)