If you're going to run for the presidency from the Senate, you shouldn't rack up years of experience. You have to go early.

I had been thinking that it's ridiculous for Rand Paul and Ted Cruz to imagine that they're ready to run for President. They're first-term Senators, as was Barack Obama. But Barack Obama won, and suddenly, I'm thinking that wasn't a fluke. That is, in fact, what you must do if you're running as a Senator.

I'm thinking this as I'm reading Robert A. Caro's "The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Vol. IV." Read this:

One of Jack Kennedy’s most impressive characteristics was an ability to observe— and to generalize from his observations, to understand the implications of what he was seeing— no matter how hectic his pace might be: to “learn on the run,” as one of his aides would put it. And as he raced back and forth across the United States in 1957, and continued to do so at the beginning of 1958, he had drawn one definite conclusion: that, as he told a friendly reporter at the end of 1957, “The Senate is not the place to run from”— that not only was being a United States senator not much of an advantage when it came to running for the presidency, it might even on balance be a disadvantage, and quite a considerable one at that. While newspaper and magazine coverage of the Senate, of necessity consisting of hard-to-follow explanations of arcane legislative technicalities, didn’t translate into public interest in that body, and the benefit to a presidential candidate in being an active senator was therefore very limited, the liability inherent in such a role wasn’t limited at all. A senator was constantly being forced to take stands on controversial issues, and such stands antagonized one side or the other — which meant antagonizing individuals or groups whose support a senator needed if he wanted to be President. One reason that Kennedy had lost the vice presidential nomination to Kefauver [in 1956] was the refusal of Midwest states to support him because of a vote he had cast against an Eisenhower Administration bill to prop up farm prices. And then there had been the Joe McCarthy issue: McCarthy was a friend of Joseph Kennedy Sr., a friend of the whole Kennedy family; in fact, Kennedy had been the only Democratic senator not to vote for McCarthy’s censure. Kennedy had hoped that the fact that he had been in the hospital for much of the censure debate might insulate him from criticism for not voting; it hadn’t. In the history of the United States, only one senator — Warren Gamaliel Harding in 1921— had ascended to the White House directly from the Senate, and Kennedy understood why: “No matter how you vote, somebody is made happy and somebody unhappy,” he explained. “If you vote against enough people, you are dead politically.”

Jack Kennedy had the ability not only to “learn on the run” but also to act on what he learned, to act rationally, dispassionately, coldly. Spending time in the Senate was a drawback, so he would spend as little time as possible there: that meant not doing the job to which he had been elected. He would be criticized —for absenteeism, for shirking his duties. But he had calculated that, in terms of his presidential run, such criticism would be far outweighed by the benefits from campaigning across the country; it was a criticism that would have to be accepted — and he accepted it.

See how well that tracks what Obama did? Cruz and Paul are doing the same thing. It's what works. Compare John McCain and Bob Dole and [insert names of lots of Senators that I've forgotten].