Middle of the Night Phone Calls Posted by David Shorr

I have a question. How often do presidents make major foreign policy decisions on the spot, within a space of minutes? If the answer is not very often (or never), then if you lengthen the timeframe to hours or days doesn't it become much less an issue of a leader's ability to make snap judgments? I'd rather not get into the middle of the debate about experience; experience is good. I just want to clarify how we really see this aspect of the job descriptoin for POTUS.

Comments

[Mike M.]

It's happened in my lifetime... once. I guess that would be on 9/11 and the decision was Cheney's -- he authorized the air force to shoot down any hijacked planes still in the air. And as I recall, by the time Cheney even made that decision the threat had passed. So... no, this never happens.

The Cuban Missile Crisis was a tense quick-thinking time but that lasted 2 weeks.

So... yeah... President probably not roused at 3 am to make life and death geopolitical decisions within the next 20 minutes...

[Zathras]

Look, the next time Bill Clinton gropes some woman or hits on one of his secretaries, Hillary Clinton will know what to do. She's been through it before; she's tested, she's ready.

Can Barack Obama say that? Does he have that kind of experience? Well? Well?

The only thing I have to add is this: Joe Biden, Chris Dodd and Bill Richardson have no grounds for complaint here. They had their opportunity to differentiate their actual experience with international affairs (and, in Biden's case as well as Dodd's, their genuine accomplishments in domestic policy) with Hillary Clinton's faux experience. They chose not to take it; their failure is their fault. But the tack now being taken by the Clinton campaign, after Democratic voters have already indicated that they do not place the highest value on real government experience, reflects desperation more than anything else.

I can offer lots of criticisms of Barack Obama, and lots of reasons why he shouldn't be President. The idea that he is dangerously less experienced than Hillary Clinton is not one of them.

I have had so many experiences with so