"Hands-On," Day-to-Day, "Down-in-the-Trenches" Experience for POTUS ....

.... How important is it to you personally for a contender for the office of Chief Executive of the United States to have any experience like the kind I described in this thread's title?

IMHO, as a concerned voter, I'd say that since the person who occupies the Oval Office is considered to be the most powerful leader of the only undisputed superpower on earth, it ought to be a prime consideration for anyone who cares about who will be not only the next Commander-in-Chief of our nation's military, but also the one human being who will, in a sense, control America's political as well as social agenda for as long as his residential address is 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, DC.

Yet as a poll conducted by CNN/ORC of voters who are or lean Republican that was conducted September 17-19, 2015, that kind of experience didn't seem to play much of a factor for the GOP's top three most favorable contenders since none of them has ever held any kind of elective political office in their lives.

According to this poll that appeared in the September 21, 2015, and claimed to have a margin of error of 4.5 percentage point either way, puts the following people in the top three positions for people who claim that they'll probably vote Republican come November, 2016, are as follows:

1) Donald Trump at 24%
2) Carly Fiorina at 15%
3) Ben Carson at 14%

When you add all three of their favorable percentage points together, you come up with a figure of a little over 50% of all the persons who responded to this presidential favorable poll.

So, what do you think? The last person's POTUS's that had little political experience before becoming POTUS in the last 40 or so years were Republicans Gerald Ford and George W. Bush and Democrats Jimmy Carter.

How history will rate their positive contributions for a stronger America remains to be evaluated since, IMHO anyway, their terms as POTUS are still in many peoples' estimation not far enough removed to form a very unbiased view of the strengths and weaknesses of their respective tenures as POTUS's.

How do you evaluate these top three GOP POTUS's' at less than 13 months away November, 2016?

 

Squire--

I'm not disputing the fact that Ford held these offices, but only one of them was the result of his winning by the voting population at large was that of his being Michigan's congressman from that state's 5th Congressional District--a district located in Michigan's "thumb," and comprised an area that's still for the most part a collection of small cities and towns, the largest one would most likely be Flint, with a population of under 100,00 according to the most recent census reports.

Obviously, that district is not in Detroit or Lansing (MI's capital city) or Grand Rapids--cities that are much larger than Flint and wherein would probably wield more political influence within the Wolverine State.

I don't know what US House committee assignments Ford held during his tenure as a US Congressman, so I can't say if any of them would have offered Ford much "hands-on" experience in dealing with the other major foreign nations, especially the Cold War giants such as the USSR and China and their respective allies throughout the world while Ford was serving in the House of Representatives.

All of the other offices you listed were either ones that were appointments--mainly by either the House in general, or by the POTUS.

I'd say that the only nation that Ford might have much inside info on would most likely have been China due to the fact that he served as US Envoy there.

Another thing about which I'd like to know is why Nixon choose Ford as Spiro Agnew's replacement. I suppose that some of it was due to the fact that Ford seemed to be a likeable kind of politician, and thus, would have little trouble being confirmed by the US Senate. He didn't because he was opposed by only 3 Democrat senators.

Personally, I don't feel Ford was much of a dynamic and forceful leader while he was POTUS. Rather, although he had some basically good ideas, he was hampered by the Democratically-controlled Congress. As a result, he holds the record for having the second largest number of bills vetoed by his former friends in Congress.

He struck me as the kind of POTUS who didn't really control much of the Executive Branch either. Case in point was about the problem of inflation back then.

While Ford was probably right to identify inflation as being the main culprit to our nation's economy back then, but Congress disallowed much of his programs to fight inflation back then.

I still remember those little "WIN" pins that he pushed back then. That sure did much to put an end to inflation back then, didn't it!??!

Ford was too much of a "centrist" in my book, and apparently that didn't set too well with the GOP's more conservative wing--a disenchantment with which prompted Ronald Reagan to mount a challenge to Ford's centralism at the 1976 GOP Convention.

The 1976 POTUS race was pretty much a disaster for the GOP. We lost the White House as well as many House and Senate seats. As a result, the US gained a far worse political leader than Ford--Jimmy Carter!!