Source: Politico
Clinton leadership a study in missteps
By: Jim VandeHei and David Paul Kuhn
April 9, 2008 10:23 AM EST
Hillary Rodham Clinton wants voters to decide the nomination based on who can coolly and competently run the country. She had better hope they don’t study her recent campaign too closely for the answer.
Clinton has overseen two major staff shake-ups in two months. She has left a trail of unpaid bills and unhappy vendors and had to loan her own campaign $5 million to keep it afloat in January. Her campaign badly underestimated her main adversary, Barack Obama, miscalculated the importance of organizing caucus states and was caught flat-footed after failing to lock up the nomination on Super Tuesday.
It would be easy to dismiss all of this as fairly conventional political stumbling — if she hadn’t made her supreme readiness and managerial competence the central issue of her presidential campaign.
...
“In every campaign, the strategy is important and the day-to-day management is important. And in Obama’s case, it’s hard not to argue that they have run a great campaign,” said Steve Elmendorf, deputy campaign manager for Kerry’s 2004 bid and a Clinton supporter. “It’s been one of the best-run presidential campaigns in the last 20 years. I think they are focused and disciplined and on message. … The test of a good campaign is having a plan and keeping an operation on track to execute a plan.”
Put simply, Obama has shown he can offer a compelling vision, execute a complicated strategy to convey it and, all the while, keep the ledger in the black. That’s not a bad first step to becoming a strong leader.
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http://dyn.politico.com/printstory.cfm?uuid=307AC4F4-3048-5C12-00601BDE2DDB440AI post this specifically because it relates to my criticism of Senator Clinton. I have not bought into her message that she has the best experience to lead, or that she is ready to lead. In fact her campaign has been executed in much the same way has the Iraq war has been executed - with overconfidence, lack of planning and gross mismanagement. In contrast, the Obama campaign has been stellar, one of the best organized most professional campaigns in recent memory. He doesn't have to just "claim" good leadership ability or good judgment, he demonstrates it every day he steps on the campaign field and breaks records.
Leadership. Judgment. Competence. That's Obama.
EDIT - RELEATED STORY:
Obama's happy, drama-free appeal
By: Roger Simon
April 8, 2008 06:40 AM EST
In the days and weeks ahead, the Barack Obama campaign is going to pose a simple question to the undecided voters and undeclared superdelegates who will decide the Democratic nomination for president: If Hillary Clinton can’t run a good primary campaign, how is she ever going to run a good campaign against the Republicans?
And while she says she is ready from Day One to be president, she is at something like Day 430 into being a presidential candidate and her campaign seems to be going from bad to worse to train wreck.
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http://dyn.politico.com/printstory.cfm?uuid=2B1AEBEF-3048-5C12-0074D4AF8CF7B8BB