Executive experience is highly overrated

Sheila Rhone Blanton, North Las Vegas

Friday, Sept. 19, 2008 | 2:05 a.m.

Here’s my answer to John Encinio’s question or two in his Tuesday letter regarding Barack Obama’s executive experience. Mr. Obama’s executive experience is not the question because whoever our next president is, he will be the first president in more than 40 years with no executive branch experience.

Past presidents such as James Madison, John Quincy Adams, James Buchanan, Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy lacked what Mr. Encinio called “executive experience” and in his words “could not even walk in the front door of any major American corporation to ask for a job as its president or chief executive.”

In addition, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Benjamin Harrison, James A. Garfield, Ulysses S. Grant, Franklin Pierce and Zachary Taylor never had executive experience as a U.S. vice president, a major Cabinet secretary, a governor or a mayor.

Past presidents in their humble years have been farmers, surveyors, tailors, clothing retailers, actors, plantation owners, teachers, investors, tanners, writers, ministers and prizefighters. So let’s not be so quick to judge Mr. Obama, belittle his community and grass-roots organizing and accuse him of representing a “fiasco in the making.”

I am ecstatic that our next president is coming from the Senate; at least he will have a working knowledge of how Washington functions and how that affects all of the United States and the world!

Last, running a presidential campaign coast to coast would definitely be more than a “smattering of midlevel executive experience.”