One thing I look at when evaluating candidates for high office is how they manage their campaigns. I am not talking about ideology here, but about personnel turnover and — even more important — fiscal responsibility. So far, Barack Obama scores high on both fronts, and his opponents have done rather poorly. I don’t know about you, but I want a Chief Executive who can manage a budget, especially considering that the president who follows Bush is going to have one hell of a fiscal mess to clean up.

McCain ran his campaign broke and into debt at one point. Hillary Clinton’s campaign is broke now, kept alive by personal loans (reportedly at least $5 million) she has made to it out of her own pocket. Clinton and McCain have both changed campaign managers and high-level advisors a few times, too, while Obama is still working with his original team.

Obama has been a hugely successful fund-raiser — far more successful than McCain or Clinton — which is a major reason his campaign has run so smoothly. This is not a negative, but a point in his favor. It shows that Obama and his staff focus on both sides of the ledger, not just on the spending side.

Back when we didn’t mind paying taxes as long as we got good value for our money, we called this attitude “fiscal responsibility” and prized it dearly when we chose our political leaders. Indeed, “fiscal responsibility” was once a Republican strength, and was a major reason to vote for Republican candidates even if you didn’t agree with all of their philosophical views. Sadly, this is no longer true. Republicans are now happy to constantly cut taxes even as they spend wildly, which ends up putting the country deeply into debt (as we are today).

I remember the Gore campaign in 2000, where you’d call to talk to a campaign aide to arrange an interview, and that person would no longer be there a week later. Call yet another week later, and the (new) person who’d promised to call you back last week would be gone. That campaign was a mismanaged mess, start to finish. Bush’s 2000 campaign, whether or not you liked its methods — especially Rove’s endless attack ads — was well-organized and responsive by comparison.

Campaign administration and budgeting don’t make for snazzy headlines, but watching the way a campaign is run tells us a lot about how the candidate will behave if elected. It also tells us a lot about the candidate’s ability to recruit and retain competent staffers, an essential skill when running an entity as large as the U.S. government.

Obama has putt together a more competent, smoother-running staff than any of the other presidential candidates this year. Maybe he’s not so great at choosing preachers, but last I looked we don’t have a cabinet-level Department of Christianity, so that shouldn’t matter.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 7th, 2008 at 9:43 am and is filed under Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.