Experience

I feel motivated to repeat a piece of wisdom i heard ye many years ago when enlisted in the USAF. A respected very senior NCO told me over beer one night that the word experience covered two different phenomena:

- 20 years experience: a wide variety of assignments with varying responsibilities and the opportunity/necessity to learn from observation and hands-on successes and errors.

- One year of experience, twenty times: the all-too-frequent result of 'just doing time' where ingrained attitudes, lazy thinking and prejudices lead to doing over and over again things that often made no sense whatsover.

McCain has the second kind of experience, and it shows to those who know enough to look - but unfortunately that group of observers doesn't include the media, our national pundits, or large swatches of the public. McCain is still (just) a fighter-plane jockey - and a somewhat reckless and inobservant one, at that. Didn't he lose four aircraft in his pre-capture Navy career?

George Bernard Shaw said something to the effect of "Wisdom isn't proportionate to a man's experience, but is rather a function of his capacity to benefit from experience."

Based on this thesis, which I think is accurate, I would rank the candidates:

Obama

Clinton

McCain

"Fairly sound" is a matter of perspective. Just because they sound good on paper or in a speech doesn't necessarily mean they are realistic.

The lack of a stint on a military affairs committee but speeches and opinions does not in any way create foreign policy knowledge or constitute real experience in the field.