There is no more important decision an American voter can make than selecting who will become the next president of the United States, and voters should not be forced to guess whether a candidate is qualified to become president. In Qualified, author Jamin Soderstrom proposes a resume challenge that could revolutionize the election system and help to bring the presidential hiring process into the twenty-first century.

QUALIFIED

Candidate Resumes and the Threshold for Presidential SuccessBy JAMIN SODERSTROM

iUniverse, Inc.

Copyright © 2011 Jamin Soderstrom
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4620-4541-9

Contents

AUTHOR'S NOTE.............................................XIIIPREFACE...................................................XVIIONE: The Resume Challenge.................................1TWO: The Constitutional Threshold.........................9THREE: Resume Creation and Analysis.......................17FOUR: Legislative Experience..............................29FIVE: Executive Experience................................51SIX: Military Experience..................................73SEVEN: Foreign Experience.................................95EIGHT: Private Work Experience............................115NINE: Education/Intellect.................................139TEN: Writing Ability......................................165ELEVEN: Public Speaking Ability...........................187TWELVE: The Qualified Threshold...........................215THIRTEEN: Intangibles.....................................233FOURTEEN: The Re-election Question........................257CONCLUSION................................................263APPENDIX A: Presidential Resumes..........................271APPENDIX B: Current Candidate Resumes.....................315APPENDIX C: Correelation Graphs...........................335BIBLIOGRAPHY..............................................345ABOUT THE AUTHOR..........................................349ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS..........................................351

Chapter One

The Resume Challenge

You cannot escape the responsibility of tomorrow by evading it today. – Abraham Lincoln

If you call failures experiments, you can put them in your resume and claim them as achievements. – Mason Cooley

The Modern Resume

LEGEND HAS IT THAT Leonardo da Vinci created the first professional resume back in the late fifteenth century. However, the more likely historical antecedent to the modern resume is the traditional practice of using letters of introduction, which dates back to feudal England and the Middle Ages.

Over the centuries, letters of introduction have slowly evolved into what is now considered the American-style resume. The modern resume is simply a short summary (one or two pages) of a person's relevant professional experiences, education, and abilities. In recent decades, improved technology has helped resumes become highly useful tools on both sides of the job search process. Resumes now help companies find and compare qualified candidates with each other and with specific job-related criteria. They also help candidates to demonstrate their interest in and qualifications for any open positions. Today, every professional job applicant must have an up-to-date professional resume in order to be marketable and successful, and every employer requires candidates to submit a resume at the beginning of the hiring process.

One reason why the resume submission process is so widely used is that it is simple, straightforward, and produces excellent results. It spans the fields of education, business management, journalism, medicine, financial services, government, and law, among many others. The simplicity and usefulness it brings to an otherwise unwieldy job search/ candidate search process makes a well-drafted professional resume perhaps the most valuable tool in a candidate's toolbox, and the most helpful document for an employer to review. By requiring a candidate to provide an easy-to-read summary of his or her qualifications, and by permitting an employer to easily compile and compare the resumes of the most qualified candidates, the resume submission process significantly raises the probability that the most qualified candidate will be offered the position.

It is safe to say that almost every professional who has successfully applied for a job in the last decade used a resume. In fact, most probably have an up-to-date resume on file for any future employment searches. This reality spans every profession and every professional ... except politics and politicians.

Presidential Resumes

Collectively, American voters are without a doubt the world's most important hiring managers and employers. They are always searching for candidates for local, state, and national political positions, and they spend big money doing it. Their search results help to hire mayors, members of city councils and state assemblies, governors, representatives and senators, and, most importantly, vice presidents and presidents.

Nevertheless, voters are still forced to compile for themselves—using the Internet, the media, candidate speeches and interviews, and any other available sources—whatever information they can find that they think may be relevant to their voting/hiring decisions. No simple, standardized system is used to help evaluate all of the potential candidates for political office at the beginning of the hiring process and to help weed out any unqualified candidates.

The current election process skips the crucial step of reviewing a candidate's basic qualifications (as would be summarized on a resume) and moves straight to the later step of interviewing the candidates. Voters and the media ask which candidates are "most liked" or "most agreed with" (or "least disliked") rather than which candidates are most qualified. Fancy campaign advertising and polished presentations in debates, interviews, and stump speeches seduce voters and the media alike. But come Election Day, all any voter can do is guess whether one candidate's qualifications are better or worse than the others'.

As recently as the 2008 election, the American voters/employers still used a backwards hiring proces. And to date, no presidential candidate has ever followed the most basic job search requirement by proactively distributing an official resume to his or her prospective employer, the American voters. With all that can be gained from evaluating a candidate's professional resume, there is no good reason why voters are not already insisting that all presidential candidates submit their official resumes to the American public prior to the 2012 election.

The Advantages

Many of the advantages of insisting that presidential candidates publicly release their official resumes are obvious. It will streamline the early stages of presidential campaigns, caucuses, and primaries. It will enable voters to carefully analyze and quickly dismiss any candidates who are clearly unqualified. And it will help voters to better compare candidates with each other.

Using a resume submission process will also give greater historical context to every presidential election, helping voters compare the basic qualifications of current presidential candidates with those of past presidents (both successful and unsuccessful). Making accurate comparisons between current and future candidates and past presidents becomes dramatically easier when using standardized resumes that are based on every president's constitutional, historical, and practical responsibilities.

Moreover, insisting on reviewing presidential resumes has no drawbacks. Resumes will never replace stump speeches, press interviews, public debates, or campaign advertisements. They may help narrow the field more quickly than usual, but...