John Guardiano uses Obama’s election argument in support of Bachmann and Ryan:

In defense and foreign policy especially, the president often must make executive command decisions that only he can make. But the success of these “command decisions” depends far more upon ideological bearings and good judgment than it does upon “executive experience.”

Certainly, judgment is important. In spite of a decade of executive experience, Rick Perry has shown on many occasions that he has very poor judgment, and that should be taken into account. Nonetheless, at least his record as an executive gives us some idea of how Perry reaches decisions and how he might govern. When it comes to legislators as candidates, we’re mostly just guessing, which leads people on all sides to project their hopes and fears onto the candidate. One of the difficulties in assessing the quality of a legislator’s judgment is that there is often very little one can use other than the positions a legislator has taken in his career. They don’t tell us whether he has any of the managerial and administrative skills to which Guardiano refers, and they give us no idea how he would react in a crisis.

We know even less when a legislator has few notable achievements in his political career. No one can blame Bachmann for things that passed through Congress when she was a minority back-bencher, but that just underscores that her national career has been spent as a minority back-bencher. Sometimes what we find in a legislator’s record tells us all we need to know. If I’m assessing Ryan on the quality of his judgment based on what he has done in the House over his entire career, I would have to conclude that his judgment for most of the last decade was not very good, as he was complicit in some of the Bush administration’s worst and most fiscally irresponsible policies. If judgment and “ideological bearings” are what matter most, the conservative case for Ryan gets weaker, not stronger.

Relatively inexperienced candidates have to appeal to judgment and ideology, because that is what they have to offer. The appeal to judgment is the one that Obama used repeatedly to good effect. Because he didn’t have much of it, Obama belittled the importance of experience in the 2008 race. He cited Clinton and McCain’s poor judgments on Iraq as the reason why it was better to trust him. The judgment that Obama made in 2002 on the invasion of Iraq was the one and really the only thing that separated him meaningfully from the rest of the Democratic field, and it was the most important difference between him and McCain on foreign policy. His original opposition to the Iraq war didn’t reliably tell voters how he would judge other foreign policy issues in the U.S. Senate, it didn’t match up very well with the platform he would run on as the nominee in 2008, and it would have been extremely misleading to expect Obama’s presidential decisions to be guided by the same thinking that informed his 2002 antiwar speech. In the end, one of the main things that led many people to trust Obama’s judgment wasn’t very representative of how he would act once in office.

As for this “elite pundit” business, let me say a few things. Paul Ryan is being avidly promoted by a number of elite pundits and journalists, and the main reason we are even talking about him as a possible presidential candidate is that some party and movement elites are unhappy with the current field of candidates. Criticism of Ryan’s qualifications for the Presidency is a reaction to having a candidate foisted on us by said elites. Nothing could be more artificial than the “draft Ryan” push being encouraged by some party insiders, and nothing would please many elite conservative pundits more than a Paul Ryan presidential bid.

Guardiano is probably right that much of the mainstream disdain for Bachmann is informed by their hostility to Bachmann’s populist conservatism, but that isn’t what informs my view at all. She has generally voted the right way on the major legislation that has come before the House since she was elected in 2006, I have been pleasantly surprised by her opposition to the Libyan war, and I have generally taken her candidacy more seriously from the beginning than most, but that doesn’t mean that she’s qualified to be President. So far, I have not seen any persuasive argument explaining why she is.