Clinton, Obama Put Focus on Management

With the race for the Democratic presidential nomination seeming to come down to a choice between Barack Obama's push for change and Hillary Clinton's focus on experienced leadership, an interesting shift has occurred: Suddenly, the issue of managing the federal government has taken center stage. It started on Monday, when Obama, in an interview with the Reno Gazette-Journal, said the following:

I'm not an operating officer. Some in this debate around experience seem to think the job of the president is to go in and run some bureaucracy. Well, that's not my job. My job is to set a vision of "here's where the bureaucracy needs to go."

Clinton took issue with that in a Democratic debate Tuesday night in Las Vegas:

I do think that being president is the chief executive officer. I respect what Barack said about setting the vision, setting the tone, bringing people together. But I think you have to be able to manage and run the bureaucracy. You've got to pick good people, certainly, but you have to hold them accountable every single day.

We've seen the results of a president who, frankly, failed at that. You know, he went in to office saying he was going to have the kind of Harvard Business School CEO model where he'd set the tone, he'd set the goals and then everybody else would have to implement it.

And we saw the failures. We saw the failures along the Gulf Coast with, you know, people who were totally incompetent and insensitive failing to help our fellow Americans. We've seen the failures with holding the administration accountable with the no-bid contracts and the cronyism. So I do think you have to do both. It's a really hard job, and in America we put the head of state and the head of government together in one person.

But I think you've got to set the tone, you've got to set the vision, you've got to set the goals, you've got to bring the country together. And then you do have to manage and operate and hold that bureaucracy accountable to get the results you're trying to achieve.

Obama responded:

Well, there's no doubt that you've got to be a good manager. And that's not what I was arguing. The point, in terms of bringing together a team, is that you get the best people and you're able to execute and hold them accountable. But I think that there's something, if we're going to evaluate George Bush and his failures as president, that I think are much more important. He was very efficient. He was on time all the time, and you know, and had... You know, I'm sure he never lost a paper. I'm sure he knows where it is. What he could not do is to listen to perspectives that didn't agree with his ideological predispositions. ...

I mean, those are the kinds of failures that have to do with judgment. They have to do with vision, the capacity to inspire people. They don't have to do with whether or not he was managing the bureaucracy properly. That's not to deny that there has to be strong management skills in the presidency. It is to say that what has been missing is the ability to bring people together, to mobilize the country, to move us in a better direction, and to be straight with the American people.

I'm not about to make any kind of endorsement in this race or the Republican one, but I'll acknowledge that I'm already on the record as saying that management really matters. In fact, nine months ago, I noted that it looked like the issue of effectively managing government operations might play a central role in this year's presidential contest, and I've been waiting for it to happen ever since.