What's more important in a Presidential Candidate, honesty or experience?

Question

If it was narrowed down to where you had two candidates, one had less experience but had limited skeletons in the closet, or the other who had loads of experience but was also loaded with scandals and skeletons, which would you choose? Honesty or experience?

Answer 1

Less experience, provided the candidate was intelligent and had good judgment. Cheney and Rumsfeld had a lot of experience, and look where they led us.

Answer 2

Honesty, hands down any day of the week. While experience can be gained honesty can not. Also honest people tend to associate and surround themselves with others of like mind and ideals. The path of honesty would be filled with many bumps and much resistance along the way, however with a group of honest people working together they could overcome many of these types of problems. While difficult at first, eventually results and respect would be the rewards.

Answer 3

Are our hurdles now so low we can only have one or the other?

In that case I would pick the one with more experience. Someone who doesn't know the course could seriously ruin our chances of advancing our Global agenda. As far as "skeletons in the closet", it would depend on what type and how many. I don't think we need another murdering fool in the Oval Office. One a millenium seems to have been quite damaging enough.

Answer 4

You can be honest about your skeletons, Bill was, when we voted for him we knew he liked women. He won anyway, we also knew he was bright and experienced in the way of governance and was an effective communicator and negotiator.
Obama lacks that finish that experience gives, its not a question of has he started and won a war before, that's a sort of on the job experience you can't get elsewhere. Its knowing who to go to, how to bend sometimes how to spin others to get what you want to get done done.
I'd ignore the kind of scandals they want us to get excited about....hes gay, maybe...he likes women...he gets expensive haircuts, she wears pink. If its a case of malfeasance or accepting bribes that's different, but the old human scandal are mostly nonsense.
I suppose I'm saying competency trumps them all.

Answer 5

This is a great question because in your hypothetical choice, like every other election, we are forced to choose between less than ideal candidates.

Why can't we have a candidate that is both? One attribute without the other won't be capable of leading our country or any other country for that matter.

Answer 6

Would it be too much to ask for a candidate with honesty and experience?

Answer 7

scandals don't make you dishonest. it makes people paranoid about you. look at the duke lacrosse case--the students were involved in the scandal, but weren't dishonest.

and there's no such thing as experience for a presidential candidate, unless you've already been president.

being a senator is totally different from being president, but not as different as being a governor.

Answer 8

Experiance is needed. We've had presidents that have been scandalous and those that haven't but despite opinions none of them have brought the country down yet. Had they not had experiance it could actually destroy us, especially in these days!

Answer 9

candidates who have little experience will destroy the country buy accident.

candidates who have skeletons will destroy it on purpose.

right about now I'm leaning towards a candidate that doesn't have a penis or whose not a christian.
this country needs a shake up thats the only way change can occur.

Answer 10

I think the "experience" component is over-rated....

Total "Honesty" is also not necessarily a virtue in politics or leadership positions

What we need is for folks to make good decisions and have the US' best-interests in mind.