Pittsburgh ? Here’s a news flash from the front lines of political Pennsylvania: It is becoming increasingly clear that the central elements of both Hillary Rodham Clinton’s and Barack Obama’s campaign pitches are deeply flawed.

One is arguing that experience will lead to excellence in the presidency. The other is arguing that hope and eloquence are the elixir of democracy. For two highly educated, sophisticated and nuanced political figures, they have learned their handlers’ lessons not wisely but too well. They’ve distilled their messages down to simple appeals, but they’re missing the bigger truths that presidential campaigns, at their best, are supposed to explore.

Value of experience

This spring, Gov. Edward G. Rendell, who has provided much of the heavy artillery for Hillary in this state, argued that Clinton had the best experience of any presidential candidate of his lifetime. Apparently he forgot about Richard M. Nixon (House, Senate, two terms as vice president), George H.W. Bush (oil man, member of the House, ambassador to the United Nations, director of Central Intelligence, diplomat at Beijing, head of the Republican National Committee), and Al Gore (House, Senate, two terms as vice president plus … newspaper reporter).

But that’s beside the point, because experience might not be the point at all.

I have argued before that well-prepared candidates such as William Howard Taft, Herbert Hoover and Nixon – with remarkable pre-White House experience – are prone to perform unremarkably, or worse, in the White House.

Last week Daniel Walker Howe, an emeritus historian at Oxford and UCLA, won the Pulitzer Prize for “What Hath God Wrought,” his brilliant history of the United States between 1815 and 1848. One of the most compelling passages of that volume deals with another presidential candidate with a shimmery resume, John Quincy Adams: “His intellectual ability and courage were above reproach, and his wisdom in perceiving the national interest has stood the test of time. In an age when presidents were typically well-prepared by prior public service, he came to office the best prepared of all.”

Adams taught at Harvard, represented Massachusetts in the Senate, served as secretary of state, was an American peace negotiator at Ghent, and held ambassadorial posts in the Netherlands, Prussia, Great Britain and Russia – a kind of diplomatic grand-slam for the times. “Despite all this,” writes Howe, “Adams was not fated to enjoy a successful presidency.”

Need for inspiration

Now to the inspiration side of this spring’s tarnished coin. Barack Obama can give a good speech, but so could William Jennings Bryan, who had only two terms in the House before he ran for president in 1896. Bryan was a mesmerizing orator, with the wind of the prairie and the waters of the Platte in his voice. He was also the last major American politician to be home-schooled, though a new generation may be on its way. But he would have been a lousy president.

Obama has arrived on the national scene much the way Wendell Willkie did in 1940. Here’s how Time characterized the Willkie phenomenon in the magazine’s political obituary for the Wall Street lawyer in 1944: “Nothing in their lives, nothing in American political history could have prepared (the nation) … for the almost religious passion that forced the Willkie candidacy over every barrier that political tricks could devise, overwhelming all precedents under the mighty chant … ‘We Want Willkie!'”

Sound like someone who’s been wandering Pennsylvania over the past few weeks?

The careful reader will recognize that in setting out the flaws of the experience and the inspiration strategies, there is a flaw in my own argument, and I want to acknowledge it. To devalue experience in a president is to overvalue vision. And to devalue vision is to overvalue experience. A columnist can’t have it both ways, just as the Democrats can’t have both Clinton and Obama at the top of the ticket. Besides, who would want to devalue either?

The ideal candidate has both, but look back on the last century of American presidents and try to find a chief executive who came to the White House with both – and succeeded in the nation’s most demanding job.

Theodore Roosevelt, maybe. Calvin Coolidge, perhaps, and I’m ready for the argument I’ll get on that one. Harry Truman, probably. All three ascended to the presidency because of the death of their predecessors. Maybe Ronald Reagan is the only one. (I can sense the breeze in the bushes for Franklin Delano Roosevelt, but his experience was so sketchy that Walter Lippmann was moved to comment: “He is a pleasant man who, without any important qualifications for the office, would very much like to be president.”)

Weighing qualifications

Both the experience and the inspiration strategies, to be sure, have worked before. Listen to Lyndon B. Johnson make the experience case against Sen. Barry Goldwater in 1964 (whose experience wasn’t much less impressive than LBJ’s) and tell me whether this sounds familiar: “Which man’s thumb you want to be close to that button, what man you want to reach over and pick up that receiver on that hot line when they say, ‘Moscow is calling’?”

And for all the talk about Quemoy and Matsu and the mind-numbing (and misleading) emphasis on the so-called missile gap in the 1960 presidential race, do not for a minute think that the principal appeal of John F. Kennedy was anything but inspiration – against an opponent, Nixon, who personified experience.

So what is the answer for a curious electorate? Perhaps it is to match the virtue with the hour. That may ultimately be why this election is so difficult for the Democrats. They cannot determine whether these times are so perilous that they require the steady hand of experience. They cannot determine whether these times are so different and difficult that they require extraordinary vision.

The result is that the Democrats’ nomination fight, nearing its next collision in Pennsylvania, is not really between Clinton and Obama. It is instead a conflict between two assessments of this moment in history: Is this a time of special danger or a juncture requiring special insight?