Executive Experience: Why Obama Has the Edge

LEIGH SAAVEDRA
29 October 2008

Is it true that a candidate can't put executive experience on his/her list of credentials unless it results from being a governor or CEO of a corporation? Baloney. (and what about JFK?) Since our 2008 candidates don't have experience in either of these fields (the little Sarah Palin has is negated by her having such sparse knowledge of anything outside the thinly-populated microcosms of Alaska), the issue of executive experience is in search of scales.

John McCain's source of fame is his reputation as a military hero, despite his having crashed five navy planes and spending only 20 hours in military combat. According to Vietnam Vets Against McCain, "Navy pilot John Sidney McCain III should have never been allowed to graduate from the U.S. Navy Flight School. He was a below average student and a lousy pilot. Had his father and grandfather not been famous four-star Navy admirals, McCain III would have never been allowed in the cockpit of a military aircraft."

On the fifth of these crashes, which was caused by a surface-to-air missile close to Hanoi, McCain ejected from the plane, breaking both arms and both legs. Soon after that he began the long five and a half year stay at the P.O.W. prison camp infamously known as the "Hanoi Hilton." This experience, horrible as it must have been, became the first building block to fame and, eventually, attempts to win the U.S. presidency.

John McCain has lived his life tactically, running the gamuts of life, from playboy to soldier to P.O.W. to wooing an heiress (while still married) to senator and eventually to presidential candidate. In all these years, the greatest position in executive experience has been the management of his campaigns for the presidency, none of which have fared very well.

Barack Obama's life experience has been almost the opposite of McCain's. Born of an interracial marriage (a father from Kenya, a mother from Kansas), Obama had to deal with the difficulties inherent in a society which has not always scored well on its treatment of minorities. Add to this that he did not grow up with economic security. His father left when he was two years old; he was raised by a single mother and his maternal grandparents.

He survived the soul-searching that marked his teenage years, and strongly a part of his life experience were the questions of who he was and where he belonged. Still, he marched forward in a life that in retrospect seems as clearly strategic as McCain's was tactical. He graduated from Columbia with a degree in political science, worked at Business International Corporation and NYPIRG, and then moved to Chicago to work as a community organizer for the poor and disadvantaged in South Chicago. After that he attended Harvard Law School, being elected the first African–American editor of the Harvard Law Review. He graduated magna cum laude in 1991.

As a lawyer he worked as a civil rights lawyer in a Chicago law firm, taught law at the University of Chicago, worked with voter registration, and eventually, after first serving in the Illinois state legislature, won a seat in the U.S. Congress.

Congress does not provide executive experience. And since neither of our candidates has ever held an executive position, what has determined and reflects their executive experience more than anything are the huge campaigns they have run during the past two years.

I would emphasize this, because the running of these campaigns is the ONLY yardstick we have for measuring their executive success. Each candidate chooses his closest advisers, his running mate, and a strategic plan that announces the direction they want to head. Getting all around the board, or the race track, or over the mountain, is a test of strength. Out of that test we get a sense of the candidate's personality, tenacity, diplomacy, morality, and general good sense.

Obama's campaign has been firm, intelligent, purposeful, and graceful. McCain's has been a series of hops and changes in direction, even changes in policy. Each campaign has been headed by a man determined to lead the country, but the fluidity of Obama's approach has been absent in McCain's from the begiinning.

Starting with handling the finances, one of the most important duties of our next president:

As early as July 2, 2007, John Berman of ABC News noted of McCain's primary run: "By now, the campaign is laying off staff in every department. Senior staff is taking a pay cut, and campaign manager Terry Nelson is working for free."

Obama's campaign at the same time was gliding forward. Because it was funded by a groundswell of supporters from the bottom up, there was a constant influx of money, and while other candidates went into debt, Obama's financial end ran steady and strong. This is a pay-as-you-go mentality that our nation would do well to study.

Next, consider the earliest choices each campaign "executive" made:

McCain was wobbly on endorsements and advisers. It was often said that his campaign "would reorganize and do better" (ABC News), but it bumped along for the entire duration except at the end of the primary season when he was firmly in the lead. After that it has been in disarray half the time. Most of us now admit that McCain's choice of the extremely underqualified Sarah Palin, new governor of Alaska, was one of the worst vice-presidential picks in U.S. history. The choice of Palin cost McCain the support of many intelligent people and entities, culminating in the October 28 endorsement of Obama by the Anchorage Daily News (Palin's newspaper) and statement that Palin was "too risky." That choice played a role in Colin Powell's endorsement of Obama. The list is long, including many well-known conservatives who could not in good conscience allow such a whimsical choice for vice-president to go unchecked.

Now the campaign is reputed to be running on three wheels, with Palin defying her handlers and looking to her own political future rather than being the team player McCain had expected. In a very subtle way, she has jumped ship and though it is not completely verified, it appears that everybody in the campaign is fighting everybody else.

In contrast, Obama's campaign has been seamless. Unlike McCain, who settled on only one strategy (all the Bush states plus one Kerry state), Obama had multiple paths to victory. The more nuanced Obama knew the value of "Plan B". From the beginning Obama redrew the map as he wanted to proceed. Obama and his serious organization had their timing down just right, whereas McCain waited until September 1st to begin serious advertising, seemingly unwilling to grasp the importance of early voting. (Adam Nagourney, The New Republic, 10-25-08). In so doing, he may have lost Florida, a tipping state by any standard. It appears (to me) that his insistence on throwing good money after bad in Pennsylvania was the main reason he is now behind in Florida, which from the beginning was a much more likely grab for him (especially had he chosen Governor Charlie Crist as his running mate).

Now, with the election less than a week away we hear rumors from within the McCain party that the in-fighting is loud and ugly. With resources tight, someone there bought $150,000 of designer clothes and accessories for Sarah Palin and her children. Palin insists that she is not going to keep them, that they are going to charity, but the main thing the purchases did was further divide those inside the campaign. There has not been one similar incident in the Obama campaign.

We are not choosing between these two senators according to executive experience in their jobs but according to their judgments and philosophies. And yet they have had two years to show us what kind of executive they would make.

Forget all the promises. The crash of the market makes it impossible for either candidate to do all he had intended. Neither will be able to do much about the debt. To simply keep us afloat by making smooth, wise decisions as the financial mess untangles itself is probably the most we can hope for in the early days of 2009.

Would we rather have an older president who jumps back and forth on both attitude and policy so often that we're never quite sure of his message or a younger president who has been as steady as a good ship's captain in a storm. It's an apt metaphor, as we ARE in a storm. We live now in the wreckage that is questioning even the basic principles of American capitalism .

This executive position will include access to our nuclear codes. The buck MAY have to go all the way there before it stops. When executive decision-making is involved, would we prefer a man who spoke out against the life-draining and financial-draining war that history will call adventurism or one who rattled his sabre and thought like a young soldier all fired up at the news that the South had seceded from the Union? Do we want a noted war hawk who might respond to another incursion across the border from Syria or Pakistan with missiles aimed at Iran or one who is first willing to exhaust diplomacy, using war as literally the last resort.

Sound bizarre? Well, it is, and it's marked by the indelible image of John McCain standing on a stage and singing, to the tune of the Beach Boys' "Barbara Ann" these words: "Bomb bomb bomb Iran."

In these two years we have seen the executive capabilities of both candidates. One, John McCain, led a campaign of negative fighting, poor choice, in-fighting, and ultimate loss.

The other, Barack Obama, has led thousands upon thousands of people in a campaign in which we know of NO in-fighting, no poor choices in people,and now see it as edging toward victory.

I'm just one, but I cringe at the idea of comparing the running of my country to the running of Senator McCain's campaign.

That's all we know of these two men's executive experience, and perhaps all we need to know.

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Leigh Saavedra, formerly writing under Lisa Walsh Thomas, is a lifetime writer and activist. She appreciates comments at leigh.saavedra@yahoo.com.

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