Ted Cruz’s “experience” charade: Starting political fires isn’t much of an accomplishment

[DonViejo]

Ted Cruz could have learned from Obama how to deal with "experience" questions. Instead he's denying it's a problem

SIMON MALOY

As my colleague Jim Newell points out, newly christened presidential candidate Ted Cruz is chafing a bit at suggestions that he is just as “inexperienced” as another first-term celebrity senator who tried to run for president: Barack Obama. In an effort to dispel this pernicious comparison, Cruz is making the case that Obama, as a senator, was a “backbencher who “did not engage in a whole lot of issues of consequence,” while Ted Cruz has been on the front lines “leading the fight on conservative principles.”

This is mostly nonsense. Freshmen senators bear no burden or expectation of leadership and experience. You could actually make a credible case that no one has done more to hamstring conservative causes than Ted Cruz, given his propensity for sabotaging his own party’s legislative agenda. Cruz is trusting that voters will confuse spotlight-attracting bombast and a flood of press releases for “leadership.”

But it’s interesting that Cruz is trying so hard to claim he has “experience,” at least compared to Obama. To the extent that the question of “experience” matters for a young candidate depends largely on what they do to neutralize it in the face of opponents with longer résumés. In that sense, the Obama comparison is instructive. Sen. Obama took active steps to defuse the “experience” issue long before he ever became a candidate for president. Ted Cruz, on the other hand, is only now trying to deal with it, and he’s doing so by denying that it’s a problem.

Obama approached his time in the Senate with the understanding that his next step would be a run for the White House, and so he tailored his legislative pursuits to the type of campaign he wanted to run. Back in 2005 he was still doing the hope-and-change spiel and wanted to run as the consensus builder, the guy who could overcome partisanship and work with Republicans to cobble together happy little centrist compromises. And so when he got to the Senate he looked for Republicans to work with. In 2006, he and Richard Lugar wrote legislation curbing the proliferation of conventional weapons and WMD, which was later incorporated into a bill that passed into law. He teamed up with Tom Coburn to call for oversight of Hurricane Katrina relief spending. It wasn’t exactly earth-shaking stuff, but it filled out an empty résumé and allowed for him to credibly argue that he could work with the GOP.

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http://www.salon.com/2015/03/26/ted_cruzs_experience_charade_starting_political_fires_isnt_much_of_an_accomplishment/