What the Bernie Sanders-Hillary Clinton brawl misses about presidential qualifications

When you step back and look at the daily bickering of the presidential campaign, it's remarkable how little of it has anything to do with what the next president will actually be doing. Each day's microcontroversies about who offended whom and who took what out of context give us little, if any, clue about what we might see in the next four years.

Which is why it should be edifying to hear the candidates argue about who's more qualified for the office. Unfortunately, it isn't.

This concerns us because this week, Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton are sniping at each other about qualifications for the presidency. Clinton said some things about Sanders not knowing much about policy issues, and Sanders replied angrily that Clinton "thinks that I am, quote unquote, not qualified to be president" (which she didn't actually say). He then offered a litany of reasons why Clinton isn't qualified ("I don't think you are qualified if you voted for the disastrous war in Iraq"), and around and around we go.

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But are qualifications actually what we're after in a president?

The real answer is that while we all think that preparation is important, we almost always treat it as secondary to our ideological goals. Think about it this way. There are two people I could name who know more than anyone about what it's like to be president: Barack Obama and George W. Bush. If we didn't have a 22nd Amendment, both would be equally qualified, in a strict sense, to be president again. But chances are you think that one would be terrific and the other would be a disaster.

That isn't to say qualifications don't matter at all. Donald Trump and Ben Carson, neither of whom ever spent a day in government, have terrified any thinking person with the spectacular ignorance they have displayed about government's basic functioning. The idea of someone who has no clue how the enormous enterprise he's leading actually works is profoundly unsettling. But beyond a basic familiarity with policy and politics, how many qualifications does a president actually need before the job begins?

If we have enough other reasons to like a candidate, almost all of us will ignore a lack of traditional qualifications, particularly since the job is so complex. And it can be hard to predict which qualities in a president will be most valuable, and what they'll be capable of once they take office.

Eight years ago, Obama ran against a group of candidates with more experience in Congress than him, but he nevertheless had a string of legislative victories in his first term as president, not least of which was the achievement of health care reform, which passed with exactly zero votes to spare. Despite his relatively thin resume as a legislator, Obama managed to accomplish something Democrats had tried and failed to do repeatedly.

Interestingly enough, many conservatives have convinced themselves that the things they don't like about the Obama presidency stem in large part from Obama being unprepared for the office, and not, say, the fact that he just has different priorities and goals than they do. For years, they made bad jokes about him being unable to give a speech without a teleprompter, on the theory that Obama is some kind of dolt who can't string two sentences together on his own. And Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz were periodically criticized by their opponents for being too green, on the grounds that Obama shows what can happen when you get an inexperienced president.

Some Republicans disagree, even if they do it in a ridiculous way; you might remember Rubio's "Barack Obama knows exactly what he's doing" line, which implied that Obama has skillfully gone about implementing his nefarious plan to destroy America.

But the truth is that hiring a president isn't like hiring a plumber or a doctor. The job is unique, and will always involve dealing with the unforeseen. I'd argue that Obama's greatest strength as president is the kind of thoughtful calm with which he approaches issues. That was certainly evident when he ran in 2008 (the phrase "No drama Obama" was often repeated), but it wasn't easy to make a direct line between that characteristic and what decisions he'd make in office.

Each of us would like to have a president who knows all there is to know about every policy issue, knows his or her way around the federal government, has relationships with all the key foreign leaders, and will be steely and wise in any crisis. But when we're choosing, most of that becomes secondary to whether the president just happens to agree with us. And the truth is that qualifications or not, we can't be really sure how they'll act until we've already elected them.