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Originally Posted by wong21fr
Wow, the Senate is more prestigious than the governorship in every state except CA and TX? Where did you get that idea? Modern political trends show that the governorship is almost a neccesity for anyone seeking the Presidency and Senators tend to be less trusted (Obama being the exception in the last thirty years). People tend to gravitate towards leaders with leadership and management experience, something that a governor has.
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You're talking to me like this is some sort of muse or observation I pulled out of my ass. The fact that being in the U.S. Senate is more prestigious than some governorships is pretty much
common knowledge for anyone who has worked on a political campaign or in the news media.
It is evidenced first by the number of people who choose to run for the Senate mid-term of their governorships, resigning from the gov. job to take a stab at the Senate, which is very common.
Compare that to the number of people who retire from the Senate to run for governor, which almost never happens except in Texas and California.
Consider the following reasons being in the Senate is a sweeter job:
Term limits - Senators frequently stay in office for 6, 12, 18... up to 36 years in some cases before retiring. Governors are less likely to be re-elected and almost all are term limited after 8 years. Just one term gets you 6 years in the Senate instead of 4 in state office.
Influence - Senators get to write and vote on national legislation.
Pay - Senators are all paid very well, whereas governor pay depends on the size of the state but is generally lower.
Name recognition - Think of all the U.S. Senators from states outside your own that you can name off the top of your head. I bet you know of Lieberman, Kennedy, Harry Reid, and several others. Now think of all the governors from states outside your own you know the names of. For the vast majority of people who follow politics, you are more familiar with the 100 U.S. senators than with the 50 state governors.
Hillary Clinton - she was a carpetbagger who came to New York to run for the Senate and events showed she could have whatever office she wanted there. If Governors are more prestigious, why didn't she run for governor, especially considering that she had presidential ambitions?
I don't get what you mean by "Modern political trends show that the governorship is almost a neccesity for anyone seeking the Presidency and Senators tend to be less trusted (Obama being the exception in the last thirty years."
Obama is the exception? Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John McCain, the three front runners in 2008, were ALL senators. Joe Biden was a senator. Al Gore was a senator. John Kerry was a senator. Bob Dole was a senator. All of those people have got closer to the U.S. presidency than Gov. Mitt Romney, Mike Huckabee or Howard Dean got. Who else are you gonna name on the governors side - Sarah Palin? See how much good she did for John McCain.
George W. Bush was a governor who beat out the senate candidates, but he was also from Texas, which, like I said, is more prestigious than a Senate seat because Texas is huge, and Bush won the presidency by a slim margin under tenuous circumstances. Ronald Reagan was from California, another big state, which seems to imply that Bill Clinton is the only anomaly of the last 30 years where a small-state governor had the name recognition to get to the White House, and even then there are some who argue he wouldn't have won if not for Ross Perot.
Not that you can assume all U.S. senators have presidential ambitions in the first place - they don't.