Lincoln was inexperienced too.

Barack Obama's announcement of his presidential candidacy in Springfield seemed largely successful, with an impressive crowd braving the nine-degree weather. But I know there was one lesson that he wanted drawn from the day that too many reporters ignored. It was that he would come to the presidency with experience in government identical to Lincoln's: two years in Washington and eight years in the state legislature.

Most observers dismiss state legislature experience as irrelevant to Washington. Having been a state legislator, I know they're wrong. The work of creating and analyzing bills followed by negotiations, persuasion, and compromise is the same. And important issues are involved in every session. Among those dealt with by Obama were tax credits for the working poor, welfare reform, early childhood education, and campaign finance reform.

On capital punishment, he took a stand that departed from conventional liberalism but displayed both courage and thoughtfulness. He does not believe that the death penalty is a deterrent to crime, but supports capital punishment in cases "so heinous, so beyond the pale, that the community is justified in expressing the full measure of its outrage by meting out the ultimate punishment." Think of a heartless serial killer like Ted Bundy and you'll know what Obama means.

At the same time, Obama pushed for measures to make sure that the wrong people don't get executed. His bill requiring mandatory taping of interrogations and confessions was opposed, according to the Washington Post's Peter Slevin, by prosecutors and police organizations and Governor Rod Blagojevich. Still, Obama managed to get the bill approved by the senate by fifty-eight to zero, and to persuade the governor to abandon his opposition and sign it. Not bad, not bad at all.