The Campaign Manager

"Perhaps the most telling critique of [Barack] Obama, to my mind, is his lack of executive experience," Andrew Sullivan writes today. He notes that he asked Obama directly about this issue during an interview in connection with a profile Sullivan wrote on the candidate in the December 2007 issue of our sister publication, The Atlantic. Obama responded, he writes, by talking about his campaign:

He observed out that he was up against the full Clinton establishment, all the chits she and her husband had acquired over the years, and the apparatus they had constructed within the party. He had to build a national campaign from scratch, raise money, staff an extremely complex electoral map, and make key decisions on spending and travel. He asked me to judge his executive skills by observing how he was managing a campaign.

"By that standard," Sullivan says, "who isn't impressed?"

Very few aren't impressed, I'd guess. But is Obama's standard appropriate? I'd suggest that historically there's a fairly weak correlation between skill at campaigning and skill at running the executive branch. Bill Clinton was a campaigner par excellence, but a strong case could be made that didn't translate into above-average effectiveness running the executive branch. The same could be said for George W. Bush. Jimmy Carter ran a highly impressive out-of-nowhere presidential campaign, but seemed overwhelmed at times by the challenge of running the massive federal apparatus.

In his 2000 book The Presidential Difference, Fred I. Greenstein of Princeton University makes the case that the most effective modern presidential executive was someone who had never before run for office until he was elected president -- Dwight Eisenhower. What Eisenhower had done was to run what was in essence a massive bureaucratic operation.

Many presidential candidates fall into the trap of thinking that doing things like making "key decisions on spending and travel" are great preparation for governing the country. But tough as they are, such decisions are small potatoes compared to, say, developing and implementing a $3.1 trillion budget.

Running a campaign has very little in common with running a country -- which is not to suggest, of course, that Obama might not be as great at the latter as he appears to be at the former. But if he is, it'll be much more impressive than winning a race for office.