The Baker rule

Given her solid performance in two GOP presidential debates, Carly Fiorina’s candidacy is definitely on the upswing. If the voters are lucky, if not the candidate, we’ll soon be inundated with detailed reporting about her career in business, particularly her role as CEO of Hewlett-Packard during a challenging six-year period.

After all, Fiorina, 61, has a lengthy record. While in another era this might have been seen as a plus, this is not the case in modern presidential politics.

{mosads}Far better for Fiorina, perhaps, if instead she had a hazier resume, ideally one without executive experience, like several (undistinguished?) first-term senators running for president in 2016. Peter Baker, a New York Times reporter, captured this ironic rule of American politics well on Face The Nation last winter, when he said: 

“Barack Obama proved that you don’t have to be in the center for very long. You don’t have to necessarily wait until you’re wizened and spend 40 years in the trenches anymore. In fact sometimes you’re better off not doing that because you have a cleaner record, you have less . . . baggage to run.” 

In short, what we can call the Baker rule means a lack of experience (and even accomplishment), executive or otherwise, actually can boost a presidential candidacy, as first-term Sen. Obama demonstrated in 2008.

Given this reality, the headline logic today is simple: failure or error in a career implies the same in the future. Period. Unfortunately, a record that includes failures does not seem to stimulate enough reporters and pundits (and voters) to consider such “baggage” in a more revealing light: how did the candidate respond to defeat or failure? What steps did he/she take to reverse or address the debacle? Did failure then help produce success later?  

In another era, Americans admired Dwight Eisenhower for his victorious generalship in World War II. His record, especially as supreme allied commander, appealed to voters in 1952, unsettled as they were by the ongoing Korean conflict and a frigid Cold War. 

Despite allied success against Nazi Germany and Eisenhower’s own significant role in that effort, the general had confronted defeat along the way. Among various controversies, the Kasserine Pass defeat in Tunisia and the Operation Market Garden “bridge-too-far” disaster in the Netherlands both occurred under the general’s overall command. These errors cost many soldiers their lives. 

With such recorded executive failures, imagine the troubles Eisenhower might face campaigning for president today. Yet this imperfect executive became president, and a good one at that.

To be clear, experience most definitely should matter in running to run the executive branch of government. Fiorina’s record as CEO of a major tech company is fair game for independent examination by media. The Washington Post provided one useful report on her business leadership just this past Sunday. Let’s hope still more media provide further examinations – ideally minus the spin that defeat or controversy in a career automatically disqualifies a presidential candidacy.

Other candidates should get the same treatment, not least the Democratic nominee-in-waiting. Regarding Hillary Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state, questions abound, such as: after the murderous Benghazi foul-up, what steps did the secretary herself institute to prevent future such disasters? What does she believe was accomplished in overthrowing Gadhafi? Or in the “reset” of relations with Putin’s Russia?  Were these successes or failures? If the latter, did she recognize this and act accordingly at the time? In short, what did she do, what did she learn, how did she change? And, yes, it does make a difference.

After the defeat at Kasserine Pass, it’s worth recalling, Eisenhower only gently relieved the corps commander directly responsible for the botched defeat. (Indeed, that hapless general even received another star!) “Soon enough,” as World War II historian Rick Atkinson observed,  “Eisenhower would develop the capacity to cut a throat without remorse or emollient, but not yet.” What is important is that Ike learned from his mistakes and developed this executive skill, and others, which served him and his country well in Europe and, later, in the White House.

More rigorous reporting on the records of all the major presidential candidates probably can’t overcome the perverse logic of the Baker rule, but it should help voters to appreciate that controversy, failure, or difficulty often mars the record of ambitious people. Understanding how resilient candidates responded to debacles in their careers ought to help us decide whether they are capable of avoiding them as president. 

Hugins is a retired Foreign Service officer.