I am Kyle's self-indulgence

My Republican friend Melanie wrote a post on her blog in which she quotes a conservative radio host as saying:

"We are at a critical time in our nation's history. And thanks to the failings of the Bush-Cheney administration, along with the incoherency of the McCain Campaign, we are about to hand the presidency to the most inexperienced, unqualified person to ever run for this office."

First of all, I think this statement is wrong on the face of it, for the simple fact that it claims Obama is the least qualified to ever run for president. Certainly he's more qualified than Ralph Nader or Ross Perot, both of whom ran multiple times in the general election. I'm sure that if you scour the history of losing presidential candidates you'll find plenty of others with little or no political experience.

But let's talk about people who actually held the office of the president. I did some quick Wikipedia research (come on, you know you do it too) and found out how many years our recent presidents held previous political offices before ascending to the presidency. For the sake of consistency I'm counting the time from when each individual was first elected to a political office to the year he was elected or appointed president. I am not counting any political party involvement, work on political campaigns, community organizing, or other non-elected office that may have preceded an elected office, even though one could argue that is also a kind of political experience.

Here are our 12 most recent presidents (plus one hopeful) in descending order of prior political experience:

Gerald Ford: 26 years
Harry S. Truman: 23 years
Franklin D. Roosevelt: 22 years
George H. W. Bush: 22 years
Richard Nixon: 20 years
Bill Clinton: 16 years
Lyndon B. Johnson: 15 years
John F. Kennedy: 14 years
Jimmy Carter: 14 years
Barack Obama: 12 years
Ronald Reagan: 10 years
George W. Bush: 6 years
Dwight D. Eisenhower: 0 years

In addition to Eisenhower, there are four men who have also held the office of president without holding any prior elected office: Zachary Taylor, Ulysses S. Grant, William Taft, and Herbert Hoover.

Later in her post Melanie criticizes the nature of Obama's experience:

What has he led? Senators do not lead. They write and vote on legislation.

This must be a new idea in American politics. Most of our presidents, including our greatest ones, have come from legislative backgrounds. It is only a recent trend, starting with Jimmy Carter, that has seen more state governors become presidents. This trend began not because governors are more experienced or qualified than legislators, but because after the Nixon presidency the voters wanted someone outside Washington (i.e., someone untainted by experience) to be president. The notion now that being a U.S. Senator somehow makes one less qualified to be president is absurd.

P.S. Using the same standard I used above, I count 8 years that Sarah Palin has held elected office.