aylor, Grant, Hoover, and Eisenhower.
It's a short list but an instructive one. Those are the men who won the presidency without first holding another elected post. Take out Eisenhower, who as supreme allied commander in Europe had learned a little something about political leadership, and the performance picture becomes clearer.
As a group, those presidents were undistinguished indeed, inactive, ingenuous or inept, ineffectual or overwhelmed. One thing that list strongly suggests is that though prior political experience hardly assures success, its absence can certainly hurt.
Now look at the current crop of Republican presidential candidates. Of those widely viewed as financially and politically viable, only Arizona Senator John McCain, with 12-plus years in the Senate and four in the House, could truly be called well-qualified, though late-entrant Orrin Hatch, a senator from Utah first elected in 1976, also clearly meets the standard.
To date in the campaign, those candidates with the most extensive electoral experience seem to be faring the worst. Last week, Lamar Alexander, a two-term Tennessee governor and former secretary of education, left the race.
The possessor of the weightiest resume in the group - former vice president, senator, and representative Dan Quayle - languishes so low in the polls many expect he, too, will soon be forced to exit, stage right.
And Representative John Kasich, chairman of the House Budget Committee, bailed out two months ago, unable to turn his fiscal accomplishments into campaign progress.
To be sure, there are reasons each has done so poorly.
First impressions are important, and by running a 1996 campaign built on hokum and trumpery, Alexander squandered an opportunity to build an enduring base. Quayle - his image as intellectually mediocre struck seemingly indelibly in the public mind - hasn't won a deserved second look from his party.
And though Kasich, an Ohioan, is a respected and knowledgeable player on Capitol Hill, most Americans tend to see congressional chairmen as anonymous insider players.
So does this mean that voters have come to pay more attention to ideology and personality than experience? Although that's how it may look at this stage, it's not the case, says Bruce Buchanan, professor of government at the University of Texas at Austin. When it comes time for voters to cast their ballot for president, they give considerable weight to a candidate's background, he says. ''One of the things you have to have is some political experience,'' says Buchanan. ''People feel more comfortable if somebody has done this kind of work before.''
Previous government experience imparts three types of knowledge essential for presidential success, says Sandy Maisel, a government professor at Colby College: first, an actual, as opposed to civics-book, knowledge of how the federal government really works; second, an understanding of how to operate in a milieu with competing power centers; and finally, the instincts to ask the right questions about policy.
Although that grounding may sound basic enough to learn on the job, it's a sufficiently tall order that it thoroughly confounded Jimmy Carter, who flooded Congress with initiatives while slighting its leaders, and at least initially flummoxed Bill Clinton, who came to Washington assuming he would benefit from bipartisan bonhomie.
On the Democratic side in 2000, Al Gore, a two-term vice president who has also served eight years in the Senate and four terms in the House, and former New Jersey Senator Bill Bradley, who spent 18 years in the Senate, both clearly possess the requisite governmental credentials. But how does the GOP field, as tiered by Iowa's Aug. 14 Republican straw poll, stack up on the experience scale?
George W. Bush
Bush has served 4 1/2 years as governor of a state where the Legislature is ascendant and the chief executive's powers limited. Still, as a big state, Texas figures prominently in the American imagination, and just running the bureaucracy there imparts an important backgrounding, says Maisel.
Meanwhile, Bush has clearly learned the all-important art of political negotiation and compromise. But a lack of real policy expertise is just as obviously a weakness.
Verdict: ''I think he is just barely over the line,'' says Buchanan, who has watched the Texas governor closely. ''But at the moment, Al Gore or Bill Bradley,'' the two Democratic candidates, ''would chew him up and spit him out in a debate.''
Steve Forbes
For journalists, it's a reaffirming notion indeed that one of their own could easily make the transition from scrivener to president and proceed to set the world aright.
And yet, history suggests otherwise. The best example of a journalist seeking the presidency is Horace Greeley, crusading 19th-century editor of The New York Herald Tribune, and a far brighter star in the firmament of his day than Forbes is. Greeley was soundly walloped by Ulysses S. Grant in the presidential election of 1872.
In Iowa, Forbes's second-place straw-poll finish proved that money can buy a candidate a certain amount of love in politics. But what experience really qualifies Forbes for the Oval Office? Well, argues Greg Mueller, senior adviser for communications in the Forbes camp, the president is a chief executive and ''Forbes is not only the chief executive of Forbes Magazine, but he has a number of other business affiliates.''
And what of the fact America has never elected anyone as politically inexperienced as Forbes? ''In the new millennium, we think the fact that he hasn't held elective offce is going to be quite a plus,'' said Mueller. ''If people want to get some of the reforms done, it is going to take an outsider.''
Valiant spin, but history has a sterner standard.
Verdict: ''Nobody in their right mind would argue that you could pluck somebody out of nowhere to run Forbes magazine, and yet he argues that he could be plucked out of Forbes magazine to be the nation's political leader,'' says Shirley Anne Warshaw, professor of political science at Gettysburg College. ''I don't think anybody is going to find that very convincing.''
Elizabeth Dole
She likely wouldn't be flattered by the comparison, but the closest historical analogue to Dole, who has run the American Red Cross and served in a variety of appointed posts, most notably secretary of transportation and secretary of labor, is probably Herbert Hoover.
Bright, well-regarded, successful in everything he had done, Hoover was US Food Administrator under President Wilson, where he was in charge of price stabilization and food distribution during World War I. Later, he directed the post-World War I relief efforts in Europe. And he was a crusading secretary of commerce under President Coolidge. Still, Hoover proved too ideologically rigid to deal with the Great Depression, a challenge Franklin Roosevelt's years as governor of New York better prepared him to meet.
So far, observers have found Dole uncomfortable with the extemporaneous demands of a campaign, slow to capitalize on opportunity, and uncertain on the broader range of issues.
Verdict: ''Dole has some plausibility because of her name and high-level government positions, and she has run a $2 billion organization,'' says political analyst William Schneider. ''Still, if she were nominated, her lack of elected experience could be a problem for her. Some voters would say, `What has she really done that qualifies her to be president? '''
Gary Bauer and Pat Buchanan
Bauer is well known among conservatives for the decade he spent running the Family Research Council, a conservative policy group. Buchanan, another journalist who would be president, is widely known as a cohost of CNN's ''Crossfire'' and as a newspaper columnist.
But as for real political experience? Staff members, both.
Buchanan counts his days as a Nixon press aide and speechwriter and his two-year stint as director of communications for Ronald Reagan.
Bauer held a number of positions under President Reagan, the most important of which were director of the office of policy development and an undersecretary of education.
Buchanan was ''going to summits when some of these kids were still riding a tricycle,'' argues Bob Adams, Buchanan's campaign spokesman. But traveling about the world in the entourage of famous leaders does not, of itself, qualify one for leadership. If it did, as Alexander the Great once noted, his longtime pack mule would have been a general.
So far, says Warshaw, neither Buchanan nor Bauer has demonstrated the ability to forge consensus around his agenda, a skill a successful career as an elected official teaches. Indeed, both in 1992 and 1996, Buchanan has been just the opposite: a polarizer who scares voters away.
Verdict: ''Their service [as White House aides] doesn't give either of them any credibility, particularly if you look at what they were doing when they were in the White House,'' says Maisel, the Colby government professor. ''They were the house ideologues.''
So, when you combine experience with current standing, what do you get? With the caveat that it's too early to tell with Hatch, right now ''there are really three candidates who are plausible: Bush, McCain, and Dole,'' said Schneider.
Assuming the GOP wants to win in November, that is.
