Who is qualified to be president of the United States? Do
qualifications matter? As we celebrate Presidents’ Day, it’s
worth pondering what kind of background makes a president
successful. The Constitution stipulates only that a candidate be
a natural born citizen who is at least 35 years old and has
lived in the country for 14 years. The assumption for all
political offices is that we want qualified candidates, and the
more qualified, the better. The main qualification we value is
experience. Again, the conventional wisdom is that more
experience is an asset. Interestingly, some of America’s most
qualified presidents performed the worst, and perhaps our
greatest president, Abraham Lincoln, was among the least
qualified. For example, John Quincy Adams had been a professor
at Harvard, a senator from Massachusetts, and a minister (we
didn’t use the title “ambassador” at the time) to the
Netherlands, Prussia, Britain, and Russia. He helped negotiate
the Treaty of Ghent that ended the War of 1812. Fluent in Frenc