It’s curious that the competitors for the Democratic presidential nomination – Bernie Sanders, the Vermont senator, and Hillary Clinton, the former secretary of state – have struggled to extricate themselves from a “low-blow” fixation, which began some time ago and then, albeit briefly, moved to a new, lower level: whether either is qualified for the presidency.

This era probably began in February, when Clinton called it a “low blow” for Sanders to suggest that she’s a part-time progressive. Sanders had to fend off Clinton’s remark, during the first post-New Hampshire debate, that “the kind of criticism that we’ve heard from Senator Sanders about our president I expect from Republicans”. As those words were uttered, Sanders, looking outraged, called it “a low blow”.

All of this has managed to disguise the issue raised more or less directly by Clinton and Sanders: whether either one – or anyone – has the qualifications for a job that is possibly more stressful and difficult than any other.



The task was understood by President Dwight D Eisenhower who, in the fall of 1954 – a year before he suffered a major heart attack – told Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery: “No man on earth knows what this job is all about; it’s pound, pound, pound.”

What Ike knew is a reminder that, apart from the pounding, and having to make decisions that can affect the lives of millions (such as the Iraq invasion ordered by President George W Bush), an attempt to measure a future president’s qualifications is a hopeless assignment. The only way to gauge qualifications for the office is to be tested by its demands, leaving a person’s judgment as the most important qualification of all.

When you consider the office-seekers of recent years, you realize that the presidency – unlike, say, a county sheriff or a village mayor – may be a job that demands no particular qualifications or credentials from an applicant. Candidates have included everyone from former Arkansas governors (Bill Clinton, Mike Huckabee) to first-term senators (Barack Obama, Marco Rubio) to a failed CEO (Carly Fiorina).

When then New York governor Franklin D Roosevelt sought the presidency, the columnist Walter Lippmann judged him to be “a pleasant man who, without any important qualifications for the office, would very much like to be president”. He proved how easy it is to miss the point that one simply cannot predict a president’s performance.

After all, apart from Eisenhower, who had demonstrated an ability to manage a Big Thing (the war to defeat Nazi Germany), it is hard to imagine any 20th-century would-be president whose credentials were stronger than those of Richard M Nixon, a bright man who had served in the US House and Senate, then eight years as vice president, during which time he became familiar with most domestic and foreign issues.

He was personally acquainted with such world leaders as Charles de Gaulle, who admired him, and Nikita Khrushchev, who did not. John F Kennedy, who defeated Nixon in 1960, was a senator, two years into a second term, whose illnesses and absences made his congressional record notably slight and hard to judge. But he possessed other qualities, the sort voters still look for.

In the summer of 1974, Nixon was forced by the Watergate scandal to resign the office he had worked so hard to win. “To paraphrase Talleyrand,” he later wrote, “Watergate was worse than a crime – it was a blunder.” It was, though, far worse than a blunder; it revealed the absence of the sort of judgment required of any president, no matter how sterling his résumé and credentials.