Blowing & Drifting

I find the arguments about “executive experience” to be one of the stupidest themes of the presidential campaign so far: Palin supposedly has acquired this mysterious mantle while serving as governor of Alaska and mayor of a small town there and Obama supposedly has no executive experience at all.

I decided to try to quantify this supposed disparity, beginning with the premise that Obama is CEO of a rather large start-up organization, his presidential campaign. Of course, he has a campaign manager and other such staff, but isn’t a good executive one who delegates well? As near as I can tell, Obama’s campaign has a “budget” of roughly $400 million dollars - the amount he’s probably raised in campaign donations by now. On top of that, the campaign has so far enlisted 1.2 million volunteers, with a goal of an even three million - roughly 1 in every 100 Americans. Sure, the effort of these volunteers vary considerably - but how is that different from the average company, or the workforce of a random state in the Union?

Take Alaska. The state has about 15,000 employees, including of course Governor Palin. For comparison’s sake, about 20,000 people have offered their volunteer services to the Obama campaign organizers in Silicon Valley. Obviously, there are huge disparities between the 49th State and Silicon Valley, such as their respective populations: less than 700,000 and 2 million, but come on: twenty thousand people interested in volunteering for Obama? That’s a lot of nerds to herd.

Or look at Alaska’s budget, which is $6.3 billion for fiscal 2009. That’s a big sum of money, but Obama will know his way around big budgets. He’s spending $400 million on his own campaign, of course, but he also has some direct experience with budgets as a legislator in Illinois, where the state budget is now $65 billion. Hell, in Illinois they probably set $6.3 billion aside to bribe one another.

I’m glad to see that Obama is finally starting to fight the charge of inexperience, recently saying, “I think that our ability to manage large systems and to execute has been made clear over the last couple of years.” Predictably, McCain is scoffing at this claim. But then again, what kind of executive experience does Captain McCain have? Oh, yeah - more than 30 years ago, he ran a naval aviation squadron, with about a thousand people under his command. By all accounts, he did this pretty well, guiding the unit to its first-ever award for meritorious service. But then again, maybe he could have done better: by his own admission, this is also when he wrecked his first marriage by having several affairs.