http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/01/us...cs&oref=slogin

Asked how important experience should be for a president, he replied, "What I think is more important is judgment."

"Judgment can be borne out of experience," he said. "It would be nice to think the more experience we get, the better our judgment is. But I don't think that's the case. I mean, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld have an awful lot of experience, and yet have engineered what I think is one of the biggest foreign policy failures in our recent history. So I would say the two most important things are judgment and vision."


All the snark of that statement aside, I think he's right. Governing isn't the kind of thing many people get better at with time. Most people in government are either honest, competent, thoughtful, and have leadership qualities, or they don't. I can think of very few, if any, good politicians who weren't good politicians when they started out.

They either have it, or they don't. Obama has it. I think he's ready. George Allen, Bill Frist, John Kerry.... They don't. And never will.