An experienced Democratic field
BARACK OBAMA HAS proved to be the next new thing in the Democratic presidential pre-season, but John Edwards apparently isn't worried.
He believes this race for the nomination will boil down to a contest between Hillary Clinton and himself.
As for Obama? Voters aren't going to nominate a candidate with such limited experience, the North Carolinian is saying as he makes the rounds.
Irony, thy name is John Reid Edwards.
Certainly it's true that Obama is a relative rookie, having logged only two years in the US Senate; before that, he was a state senator.
And Edwards? Why, he can claim . . . one full Senate term.
According to the Associated Press, when asked recently what made him a better candidate than Obama, Edwards replied: "Experience. I've been through a presidential campaign." Aha.
As for Hillary Clinton? She has now served a full Senate term as well, and by the time November 2008 rolls around, it will be almost eight years, though her time as first lady and (sometimes) governing partner certainly count for something.
Still, as the primary race begins to take shape on the Democratic side, it's as though the middleweights have become not just the main event, but the only event.
Clinton and Obama -- and to some extent, Edwards -- are not simply leading the field, they're all but obscuring other serious, experienced candidates who merit real consideration.
Take Bill Richardson. He logged 14 years in the US House of Representatives before joining the Clinton administration, where he served first as ambassador to the United Nations -- giving him some foreign-policy credentials -- and then as energy secretary. He's in his second term as governor of New Mexico.
Richardson, then, is a man who has held important posts at various levels of government. And he's got more time at each of those levels -- federal lawmaker, high-level presidential appointee, and governor -- than Obama currently does as a US senator.
Although many a senator seeks the presidency, in the pre-9/11 era anyway, it has usually been governors who have ended up in the Oval Office -- and Richardson isn't the only chief executive running. There's also Tom Vilsack, who just left office after completing his second term as the smart, pragmatic governor of Iowa , where he improved education, expanded health care, started a state venture fund to boost business, and promoted the ethanol industry.
Certainly any ranking of the influential figures in today's Senate would have to include Joe Biden, now in his sixth term. Yes, Biden has an easy-to-lampoon propensity for prolixity. But he's also led both the Judiciary Committee and the Foreign Relations Committee, which he once again chairs. He's hard-working and knowledgeable about the world, and it shows: His plan for quasi-autonomous regions in Iraq for the Kurds, Shia, and Sunni Arabs increasingly looks like the most palatable of a series of abysmal choices.
Although Connecticut Senator Chris Dodd is a decided dark horse in this field, he's no legislative lightweight. Elected to the House of Representatives in 1974, he moved up to the US Senate in 1980, and is now in his fifth term. A staunch liberal, his accomplishments include sponsorship of the Family and Medical Leave Act.
But in early polls, those candidates all languish far behind Clinton and Obama, with some pundits wondering, long before the first primary vote has been cast, whether there's even room for some of the single-digit figures in the race.
Then there's the possible candidate who would trump any hopeful on either side in the experience department: former vice president Al Gore, who has also served eight years in the US Senate and four terms in the House. He, too, lags both Clinton and Obama in early polls.
Has a less experienced candidate than Obama been elected in modern history?
In the 20th century, only Woodrow Wilson, says Garrison Nelson, professor of political science at the University of Vermont. Well-regarded as president, Wilson had just two years as New Jersey's governor before taking office. (Aside from secondary stints in state government, Warren Harding had a sole, undistinguished US Senate term.)
Some argue government (or military) experience doesn't matter.
Certainly it's up to the lesser-known candidates to demonstrate why it does.
But it's also important for the media to give them a hearing -- and for voters to lend them an ear before leaping into the easy embrace of a celebrity candidate.
Scot Lehigh's e-mail address is lehigh@globe.com. 
