| Presidential Resumes |
[Mar. 11th, 2008|10:16 pm] |
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So, I was looking at the bit on electoral-vote.com about Greatness vs. Experience, and I was reminded of something. A few years back, I remember hearing some pundit claim that every Senator is running for president until they tell you that they're not, which struck me as a bit odd, but within the stereotype I had of a career politician:
But, then I thought at the same time that senators haven't really become president lately. In fact, none of the presidents in my lifetime have ever been senators. In fact, the most recent president to have been a senator was Nixon, and the most recent to go directly from senate to the presidency was Kennedy. Then, I decided to look at the different routes taken to the presidency. And then I made a graph!
So, there's a lot to explain with this graph. For example, I dropped a few presidents off. And by a few I mean eleven. The first 6 get dropped off because that seemed like a good place to cut, most of them had pre-constitution positions, which add a bunch of extra nodes, and John Quincy Adams's trip back to Congress from the presidency causes graphviz to put the president somewhere in the middle of the graph, instead of nearly at the bottom. The other 5 presidents that I dropped off were never actually elected president. They all became president due to the death or resignation of the sitting president and did not serve a second term. All presidents who ascended to the presidency due a vacancy but were later elected to the presidency have a dashed line for the vice president to president transition.
Several positions held by presidents in their lifetimes are also not covered. Any position in the private sector or academia, no matter if they may be considered valuable experience or not, are not represented here. Military ranks other than General held before first taking office are not represented here, and the progression of ranks is not shown. Teddy Roosevelt's experience as colonel is listed because it occured in the middle of his political career. Many lower level positions are combined together (Director of Central Intelligence and Assistant Secretary of the Navy are both under sub-cabinet, all city or county positions other than mayor are grouped together). While non-consecutive terms are shown on the graph (as recycling edges), gaps in service between different positions (such as the period when you didn't have Nixon to kick around, or the years between Abraham Lincoln leaving Congress and becoming president) are not shown. I also skipped appointed governorships like Taft in the Phillipines and Jackson in Florida, just because. Other than those, I tried my best to include the entire political career, although there is a very good chance I missed some early parts, since those might not always be mentioned in the Wikipedia biography.
The graph also does not give any sense of how long in years or terms any position was held. Van Buren's two months as Governor of New York are given as much weight as Clinton's 12 years as Governor of Arkansas.
Anyway, on to the meat of it. Hopefully, one of the first things you'll notice (since I mentioned it at the start) is that there are only 4 lines going straight from senator to president. There are also only 3 solid lines shown from the vice president to the president, which isn't so unexpected when you figure in that for a vice president to be elected a single party will have to have 3 favorable presidential elections in a row. (2 early vice president to president transitions are not shown, but those elections predated the 12th amendment anyway).
There are 31 presidents represented on this graph (Of the 43 presidents, 11 are not on the graph and Grover Cleveland counts twice. That is not a fat joke), and only two nodes that occur more than half the time are Start and President, which obviously have 31 presidents attached to them. Governor and Congress are the next two most travelled nodes, with 13 paths each. Senate is the 3rd most popular nonessential node here, with 11 paths going through it, and General is 4th, with 9 paths through it. Cabinet positions, especially Secretary of State, were once somewhat popular on the path to the presidency, but only 4 presidents on the graph went through that node (5 of the first 6 presidents were also members of cabinet).
The main point I gleaned from the graph was that not only is the sterotype I put at the top not accurate, but there isn't really any common way to get to the White House, as only 3 nodes have even a third of the paths flowing through them. There are various things you could do with this data, such as try to limit by the greatness rankings as given by historians, or limit the date range more, but I'm not sure you'd get much new information, other than generals becoming less common and governors more common as you get closer to the present. I, however, have done as much with this data as I care to for the time being, although you're welcome to it. Oh, and yes, I know that not all browsers can display SVG correctly. Mine does. |
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