I was thinking about Presidential experiences and the common ties that Presidents share. Are there certain experiences that we should look for or traits that great Presidents have in common? I was particularly thinking about Presidential participation in sports – do great Presidents play team sports, individual sports or no sports at all? It’s hard to find that kind of information about our early Presidents, but here’s what 20th century Presidents played:

George W. Bush – baseball & cheerleading
Bill Clinton – music & rugby
George H.W. Bush – baseball, soccer
Ronald Reagan – football
Jimmy Carter – basketball
Gerald Ford – football
Richard Nixon – football
Lyndon Johnson - ?
John F. Kennedy – sailing
Dwight Eisenhower – baseball, football
Harry Truman – music
FDR – rowing, tennis
Herbert Hoover – baseball, football
Calvin Coolidge - ?
Warren Harding - ?
Woodrow Wilson – cycling, golf
William Taft - ?
Teddy Roosevelt – rowing, boxing

It’d be nice if you could look at that list and make a conclusion like great Presidents learned leadership by playing team sports, but you can’t. Likewise, it’s easy to make fun of Bill Clinton as a band geek, but then you have to paint Harry Truman with that same brush. You could mock the elitism of JFK’s pursuit of sailing or FDR’s rowing, but then you’d have to include Teddy Roosevelt in your disdain.

So, I guess it’s not just about McCain, the boxer, vs. Obama, the basketball player, or Clinton, the tennis player.

On a different note, I actually had to look in one of my Reagan books to find out what sports the Gipper played. Skimming through Reagan: A Life In Letters, it struck me that perhaps that’s the kind of experience a President needs to have. The book’s editors estimate that Reagan wrote over 10,000 letters. He corresponded with all kinds of people all throughout his life. You can only live your own life and only have time to do so much, but talking to people and learning about their lives, like Reagan did, lets you learn about experiences beyond your own. I think about Barack Obama’s recent comments and it strikes me that he probably doesn’t actually know any white, rural, lower to middle class Americans. He only knows “of” them.

So maybe the key to judging future Presidential candidates isn’t in the games they played, their education or their military service. Maybe we should judge future candidates by the quality and quantity of their email correspondence and by how many Facebook friends they have!