On Executive Experience

Byron York has a really interesting piece at the Washington Examiner on Barack Obama's utter lack of experience, and how that lack has translated into outright failure in office.  Excerpt:

In mid-February 2008, fresh from winning a bunch of Super Tuesday primaries, Barack Obama granted an interview to "60 Minutes" correspondent Steve Croft. "When you sit down and you look at [your] resume," Croft said to Obama, "there's no executive experience, and in fact, correct if I'm wrong, the only thing that you've actually run was the Harvard Law Review."

"Well, I've run my Senate office, and I've run this campaign," Obama said.

Seven months later, after receiving the Democratic presidential nomination, Obama talked with CNN's Anderson Cooper. At the time, the news was dominated by Hurricane Gustav, which was headed toward New Orleans and threatening to become a Katrina-like disaster. "Some of your Republican critics have said you don't have the experience to handle a situation like this," Cooper said to Obama. "They in fact have said that Governor Palin has more executive experience. ..."

"Governor Palin's town of Wasilla has, I think, 50 employees," Obama answered. "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."

Obama ignored Palin's experience as governor of Alaska, which was considerably bigger than the Obama campaign. But his point was clear: If you're worried about my lack of my executive experience, look at my campaign. Running a first-rate campaign, Obama and his supporters argued, showed that Obama could run the federal government, even at its most testing moments. He could set goals, demand accountability, and, perhaps most importantly, bend the sprawling federal bureaucracy to his will.

Fast forward to 2010. The oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico is gushing out of control. The Obama administration is at first slow to see the seriousness of the accident. Then, as the crisis becomes clear, the federal bureaucracy becomes entangled in itself trying to deal with the problem. "At least a dozen federal agencies have taken part in the spill response," the New York Times reports, "making decision-making slow, conflicted and confused, as they sought to apply numerous federal statutes."

In short, the bureaucracy hasn't played nice with Obama at all, and he has yet to take a decisive leadership role in anything (besides undermining the foundations of America).  York suggests that future candidates will probably think twice about citing their campaigns as quality experience.

On an oddly related note, Hot Air pokes fun at Obama for one of his latest verbal stumbles, which I think really helps illustrate another way in which Obama's inexperience has manifested itself:

On June 6, 2010, most of the media commemorated the 66th anniversary of D-Day, the largest amphibious military in operation that began the liberation of a continent … well, half a continent, anyway; the Eastern bloc would have to wait another 45 years for BW-Day (Berlin Wall Day). Jim Hoft notes that President Obama didn't bother joining the rest of the country in remembering the massive sacrifice on Omaha Beach, among others, not even with a White House blog post, choosing instead to attend a splashy party instead that will get aired on ABC over the July 4th weekend.

But it took this classless moment from Bishop [Desmond] Tutu to make it a perfect OOTD entry:

"Security is not something that comes from the barrel of a gun."

The thousands of Allied casualties on D-Day can attest that sometimes it takes the barrel of a gun to end tyranny and provide security for free people. Maybe if Obama had bothered to involve himself in his nation's history, he could have reminded Tutu of that fact.

But nah, he's good to go with that stellar community organizing and campaign experience.

There's my two cents.