17?

I am silent but not gone.

Sometime last year I remember coming around to the view that things might be on the whole better if the U.S. Senate were once again elected by state legislatures rather than statewide races. I think my conversion may have had something to do with reading now-Judge Bybee's article Ulysses At The Mast. But now that I've read Akhil Amar's two recent posts (here and here) at Cato Unbound, I think I am gradually returning to the general wisdom. Not just because the trend at the time was moving toward defactor popular election anyway, but also because the senate is one of those few races in every state that is pretty much immune to the constant vagaries of redistricting.
However, I am less convinced than Professor Amar about the usefulness of the Senate as a training ground for the presidency. It is true that Senator Clinton would have more foreign policy experience if she is elected than Governor Clinton did when he was, but the White House for this reason has a whole lot of career foreign policy folks, and a whole lot more well-trained foreign policy people to give political appointments to. Foreign affairs are of course important, but it is not clear how important direct experience in D.C. foreign policy is to be able to manage them effectively. (Nor is there enough consensus on what an effective foreign policy looks like for us to be able to test the proposition empirically.)

Governors, unlike Senators, have more experience being solitary rather than collective constitutional decision-makers, i.e. being a single pivot point in the political bargaining game. I suspect that this is on the whole more useful, although again the terms are sufficiently ill-defined that it is hard to know how we would know.