Executive Experience, By Hilzoy - CBS News
On the McCain Report, Michael Goldfarb
writes that Sarah Palin "has more executive experience than Barack Obama and Joe Biden put together", a point that, by some strange coincidence, has popped up all over the
conservative blogs. I think that the idea that Palin has an advantage over Obama in this area is completely wrong.
When this campaign started, one of my biggest questions about Barack Obama was whether he would be any good at managing things. The President is, after all, the head of a very large organization, and he had better either have good management skills or hire a chief of staff who does. The fact that I didn't know whether Obama had them didn't prevent me from voting for him -- none of the other candidates I might have supported had a track record in management either -- but I would have been happier had I known whether Obama was any good at running things.
I don't have that problem any more. Obama has spent the past year and a half running a large organization -- as of
last December, it had "about 500 employees and a budget of $100 million" -- and running it very well. It's not just that he and his team beat the Clinton campaign, which started out with enormous advantages. It's not even that he
often did so by building effective political machines from scratch in states in which Clinton had locked down the political establishment. It's that every account of the Obama campaign that I've read makes it clear that he has done an outstanding job of constructing and running a political organization. For instance,
this account of Obama's campaign is very much worth reading, if you want to get a sense of how he runs things: