The Washington Post reports today that job-seeking Americans who peruse employment listings for the ensuing holiday shopping season are likely to find far fewer openings than last year. That is hardly a surprise: unemployment is rising, and people are looking for work in places and industries that they wouldn’t have considered previously.
It is far more surprising that President-elect Obama’s job listings for personnel to fill the top posts in his new administration seem to all be prefaced with “only experienced persons need apply.” This from a man whose lack of experience did not block his path to the Oval Office, and might ultimately have cleared the way.
Don’t get me wrong: I much prefer a skilled surgeon to one who is performing his first operation. An accountant who has worked for dozens of clients will likely make far fewer errors than the person who has just started her own practice. But experience doesn’t automatically translate into competence; wisdom and insight might actually be impeded by years of working in the same field, exposed only to the canon of the profession.
New thinking is particularly needed in new industries. Most of the people that Jeff Bezos hired to staff his start-up had never worked in the Internet business, and quite a few had never worked in any business at all. Today, Amazon.com is a retailing juggernaut.
New thinking — and new faces — are also welcome in old, tired industries that have run out of new ideas. (Yes, that means you Detroit automakers.)
Alas, the Washington foreign policy community has also largely run out of ideas, and the men and women in both established institutions and those newly created are still marketing products that Americans no longer want to buy. Ignoring the manifest lessons of Iraq, “experienced” Washingtonians on both the left and the right are clamoring for new and better ways to build foreign countries and fight other people’s wars; Beyond-the-Beltway Americans want to build our own country, and bring an end to our own wars.
Given his recent victory, Barack Obama clearly understands the public’s desire for change. But that applies to both foreign and domestic policy. The debacle known as the Iraq War won the support of left-leaning think tanks and academics — and 29 of 50 Senate Democrats — and yet the President-elect appears to be turning to this same, small cadre to staff his new administration. Maybe he didn’t mean it when he said that good judgment matters more than experience? Or maybe he doesn’t fully appreciate just how harmful our foreign policies since the end of the Cold War have been, and therefore misses the urgency of the need for change at Foggy Bottom and the NSC?
