[W's]legion of critics would probably assert that he alone lowered the bar for presidential preparedness, and this theory has some merit; having served just one full term as governor of a huge state before he ran in 2000, Bush was the least experienced nominee in 24 years. But American politics can never be viewed in isolation from the rest of society, and something deeper has been happening out there. The emergence of the Internet age has been accompanied, in general, by a steady devaluing of expertise. ... American voters who once looked to newspaper columnists for guidance on politics now blog their own idle punditry. Suddenly, experience is downright suspect — it’s the barrier that so-called professionals use to wall themselves off from everyone else. Americans now belong to... "“the cult of the amateur,” and, in this new world, the ideal president may be one who hasn’t governed, or at least not for long. ...
Then again, there are reasons to think that accumulated wisdom really does matter. Bush the Decider campaigned on the premise that a good president, like a C.E.O., need only be able to judge shrewdly among policy options A, B and C. But his presidency illuminates that running a White House isn’t, in fact, a simple multiple-choice test; a president’s advisers often disagree not only on the means of achieving their goals but also on the goals themselves, and a president has to filter out competing ideologies before he can clearly see the options laid before him.
Experience is what prepares presidents to stand by their convictions even when experts urge them not to, like Johnson’s signing the Voting Rights Act, or Harry Truman’s integrating the Armed Services. It is also what enables presidents to recognize when compromise — even odious compromise — is the last, best option, as Bill Clinton did on welfare reform. Lacking that kind of expertise, George W. Bush never did seem to master the balance between principle and pragmatism...
I think W still has to master the T/F format before moving on to multiple choice exams. My favored Obama can already handle essay exams, far beyond W's reach (somewhere between a phrase and a mangled sentence).
That will have to do for today's idle punditry.
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