.
Madame's Nightshirt
Mrs. Peperium
.
COOPER: And, Senator Obama, my final question — some of your Republican critics have said you don’t have the experience to handle a situation like this. They in fact have said that Governor Palin has more executive experience, as mayor of a small town and as governor of a big state of Alaska. What’s your response?
OBAMA: Well, you know, my understanding is, is that Governor Palin’s town of Wasilla has, I think, 50 employees. We have got 2,500 in this campaign. I think their budget is maybe $12 million a year. You know, we have a budget of about three times that just for the month. So, I think that our ability to manage large systems and to execute, I think, has been made clear over the last couple of years.
-- August 28, 2008
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.
--August 31, 2008, The Washington Monthly
.
Even so, the way Obama has run his campaign has been a marvel of sound management: He laid down principles, put the right people in positions of authority, and spent money strategically. And he has shown a remarkable steadiness. Whether he was far behind Hillary Clinton before the Iowa caucuses or on the verge of locking up the Democratic nomination, whether he was leading or trailing McCain in the general election contest, Obama made the same forward-looking appeal to voters’ best instincts.
-- October 8, 2008, Obama for President, The Boston Globe
.
Obama's relative inexperience was one reason we didn't endorse him in the Democratic primary, and it remains a concern: He's only three years removed from the Illinois State Senate. We are also critical of his decision to abandon a pledge to tap public campaign financing for his presidential run.
But organizing and running a national campaign is a tough test of executive ability -- one that Obama has passed impressively. We believe that he will be able to draw from his campaign and professional experience to hone conflicting ideas and philosophies into sharp policy prescriptions on the challenges the next president will face over the coming four years.
-- November 1, 2008, Newsday Editorial Board Endorses Obama
DAVID BROOKS: He is, like all supreme politicians, you come out of the guy thinking -- away from the guy thinking, "Oh, Mr. President, I love you." I mean, he... (laughing)
CHARLIE ROSE: And he knew exactly what would push your buttons.
DAVID BROOKS: I actually once went in there to -- David Axelrod walks into a meeting with me carrying "The Reflections on the Revolution in France" by Edmund Burke. They are not without manipulation.
CHARLIE ROSE: Exactly.
CHARLIE ROSE: Do you think you're going to argue that being a community organizer was very good training for becoming president?
DAVID BROOKS: The biggest shock to me, I thought, the guy's 47, the guy's barely been in Washington. Can he run an effective administration? Yes.
CHARLIE ROSE: And an effective campaign, too.
BROOKS: He has run a tremendously effective, efficient managerial administration. That is the biggest surprise and I think the biggest story of the first hundred days. Because if he didn't do that, if he didn't have the essential level of competence, nothing else would matter, people would not trust him. But he is a competent manager.
ROSE: This White House is very much an intellectual hothouse.
BROOKS: Intellectual power.
ROSE: The self-confidence and the intelligence.
BROOKS: There are certain intellects which are like fluorescent, and the president is one of them.
ROSE: He seems to be like Michael Jordan with 30 seconds to go. He wants the ball. He seems to be like Joe Montana with two minutes to go.
BROOKS: He e-mails him, "You're like Michael Jordan," and Obama e-mails him back, "Just give me the ball."
ROSE: I didn't even know that.
BROOKS: Yeah, there you go.
BROOKS: Obama didn't need the crowd. The crowd needed him.
ROSE: Is it John F. Kennedyesque? McLuhan said there are cool characters and hot characters. Bobby Kennedy was hot. Jack Kennedy was cool.
BROOKS: Well, I mean it's certainly true that Obama's cool.
ROSE: Cool.
-- April 2009, Charlie Rose, PBS
.
.
President Obama, campaigner in chief
By Dana Milbank, The Washington Post
April 30, 2012
The preezy of the United Steezy is making me queasy.
I’m not troubled by President Obama’s slow jam with Jimmy Fallon, who dubbed the commander in chief “preezy” during Obama’s appearance on late-night TV. No, preezy is making me queasy because his nonstop campaigning is looking, well, sleazy — and his ad suggesting that Mitt Romney wouldn’t have killed Osama bin Laden is just the beginning of it.
In a political culture that long ago surrendered to the permanent campaign, Obama has managed to take things to a whole new level. According to statistics compiled for a book to be published this summer, the president has already set a record for total first-term fundraisers — 191 — and that’s only through March 6. Measured in terms of events that benefit his reelection bid, Obama’s total (inflated in part by relaxed fundraising rules) exceeds the combined total of George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George H.W. Bush, Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter.
It’s not just the gatherings officially categorized as campaign events. To a greater extent than his predecessors, Obama has used the trappings of his office to promote his reelection prospects even while handling taxpayer-funded business.
According to the same book, “The Rise of the President’s Permanent Campaign,” by Naval Academy political scientist Brendan Doherty, Obama was the first commander in chief in at least 32 years to visit all of the presidential battleground states during his first year in office. He has kept that pace, devoting nearly half of his travel to 15 swing states that account for just over a third of the population.
The election is still six months away, but it’s increasingly difficult to distinguish Obama’s political events and speeches from the official ones.
This was the case on Monday, when he spoke to a group of trade-union leaders at the Washington Hilton. The event, the morning after he and Clinton made a joint fundraising appearance, was ostensibly an “official” speech to the AFL-CIO’s building trades section. But it was a campaign rally in everything but name.
The audience members shouted out Obama’s “Yes, we can” slogan and chanted, “Four more years.”
“I’ll take it,” offered the president, who unloaded on congressional Republicans for not spending money on infrastructure projects.
“Time after time, the Republicans have gotten together and they’ve said no,” he said.
“Boo!” the audience responded.
“I sent them a jobs bill that would have put hundreds of thousands of construction workers back to work,” he continued.
“Boo!” the audience repeated.
“I went to the speaker’s home town,” Obama said, referring to a trip to House Speaker John Boehner’s battleground state of Ohio, “stood under a bridge that was crumbling.”
“Let him drive on it!” somebody shouted.
“Maybe he doesn’t drive anymore,” Obama joked.
Predictably, Boehner has been complaining about the president’s campaigning. He said Obama’s team should “pony up” and reimburse taxpayers for trips to three colleges in swing states last week. Boehner called Obama’s traveling “pathetic.” The Republican National Committee formally asked the Government Accountability Office to investigate the president’s travel.
The Republicans will get nowhere with that, just as Democrats failed when they made similar complaints about George W. Bush. Rules separating the official and the political are flimsy, and even when a president’s campaign reimburses the Treasury, it’s for a tiny fraction of the cost, which includes $179,750 per hour to operate Air Force One.
In fairness, it’s not entirely clear what choice Obama has. As with his blessing of a super PAC after condemning such groups, the alternative is unilateral disarmament. Also, his fundraising total has been inflated by a rule change that allows him to hold events that jointly benefit him and the Democratic Party (although his total number of fundraising appearances still eclipses that of each recent predecessor). Republicans, meanwhile, are determined to block the president’s agenda, so it’s an effective use of time to campaign for their defeat.
Still, Obama’s acquiescence to an intolerable status quo raises a question: Shouldn’t presidential leadership be about setting an example?
Instead, he is erasing the already blurred lines between campaigning and governing. During his “official” speech to the union group Monday, he hailed Tim Kaine as “the next United States senator from the great commonwealth of Virginia,” and his partisan speech spurred audience members to shouts of “Vote ’em out!” and “Gotta throw ’em out!”
“Not everything should be subject to thinking about the next election instead of thinking about the next generation,” Obama said of the Republicans. “Not everything should be subject to politics.”
He should follow his own advice.
When you vote for the presidential candidate who ran on I-ran-a-big-campaign-so-I-can -run-the-ccountry" you shouldn't be surprised when you end up with a campaign instead of a President.
Quit your caterwauling Millbank. Besides it demonstrating exceptionally poor taste, bordering on sore loser-ish and sounding like David Brooks, you were warned by John McCain :
.
For Barack Obama to argue that he’s experienced enough to be president because he’s running for president is desperate circular logic and it’s laughable.
.
Ouch. That still leaves a mark 4 years later. The 2008 election is 16 Trillion dollars and counting over the dam. Millbank, you need to be thinking progressively. You need to thinking outside the Beltway box and envisioning what will happen if Obama is re-elected again and no longer needs to campaign?
Obama has given us a big clue :
.
.
.
Comments