FACT: You can never be 100% sure about what type of president a person will be until they are in the job and doing it for a little while. Our history shows that there have been presidents that went into the white house with a ton of so called experience and sucked. Carter was a Senator and a Governor so he had plenty of experience and he pretty much sucked. A guy named Abe Lincoln was pretty inexperienced when he got elected and he seemed to do ok for himself.
Now I'm not comparing Obama to Lincoln or McCain to Carter, I am just pointing out that you can't be 100% sure who will be a good president and who won't just based on their experience. Any of the three candidates could get in the white house and do an amazing job...or they could suck badly.
Being president is all about making good decisions and managing your staff correctly. The job is so large that they have to rely very heavily on their cabinet and advisers. Will they surround themselves with good people? And if they do will they actually listen to them? When it comes time to make a tough decision will they say to themselves, "Is this what is best for the country as a whole?" while they make that decision? Will they choose their battles wisely? Will they waste money doing something that benefits or impacts very few people or will they spend that money doing something that has a larger, more far reaching effect? Experience doesn't help make these choices that much easier. Sure, you may have some things in your past you can fall back on use as reference, but in the end you have to choose what is best for the country and until you have sat in the oval office that is something you have never done before.
Arguing the semantics of someone's experience is useless in this situation. What it boils down to is this. If something bad happens and our president has to decide on a course of action that will take us down a road we will have a very hard time turning back from, will they pick the correct road? It doesn't matter how many Senate votes you have been to. It doesn't matter how many bills you have written, argued, supported or opposed. It doesn't matter if you are white, black, a man or a woman. When the fate of the country rests on your shoulders will you do the right thing? When you have to make energy and economic policies that will effect real people's lives will you do what is best for the country? When you have to put in a judge or cabinet member or someone to head up a major agency will you pick the right person? It doesn't matter if you've served 50 years in the senate, it's not going to make any of these choices any easier.
In the end you can only guess at what type of a president someone will be. This is why incumbents are so hard to beat. Even if they are not very good, they are the known quantity and you know what you are getting where the new person is just that...new. You can look at a person's past and get an idea of what they may do, but you never can know for sure.
This election is a leap of faith because we will have two newbies gunning for the job. For every good thing they have done in their past that suggest they will be a good president, you will be able to find a bad thing that suggest they will be bad. What it comes down to really is what is the policies they lay out and say they will move forward. There is no guarantee they will actually do it, but what are they planning to do and do you agree or disagree with it. And how do they run their campaign. If they keep firing people and hiring bad people and have trouble controlling a campaign, do you want them making the big choices when they get in office or surrounding themselves with bad people there.
It is kind of like dating a new girl. You like how she looks, but you haven't spent much time with her. She could turn out to be perfect, she could turn out to be a raving lunatic. It's kind of a leap of faith.
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