Senator Barack Obama

Venting

Would someone somewhere on television repeat, over and over, that, for the last 18 months, Senator Obama been the chief executive in charge of the insanely successful 'Obama for America' campaign and has raised more money, received more primary votes and registered more voters than any political campaign in American history? That's HUGE executive experience, and it speaks volumes about his management style and competence.

On the other hand, John McCain can barely go a day without lapsing into an Ambien stupor -- confusing some such bit of serious information, while his hamfisted campaign organization is barely a notch above Palin's PTA mooseburger pot luck gatherings.

If the McBushes want to have an executive experience debate, let's roll out the ledgers and the polls and the primary results and compare notes.

And then, let's ask ourselves: would there be any chance in bloody hell that Sarah Palin could have achieved anywhere near the campaign success of Senator Obama? The other GOP candidates would have smeared and embarrassed her into a puddle of quivering hair and glasses.

Speaking of the GOP candidates, Senator Obama achieved more primary votes than the top three Republican candidates... combined. So if the Republicans want to have an executive experience debate, bring it on.

UPDATE: Looks like I'm not the only one who's up late thinking about this topic. Via Josh, Hilzoy totally nailed it here.

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.

And he alerts us to this profile by Rolling Stone's Tim Dickinson.

Repeat, repeat, repeat. It's the only way we'll break through the McBush myth-making.