Competence as a Campaign Issue

Hillary Clinton has made her experience and leadership a centerpiece of her presidential campaign. She may live to regret that.

In a piece in The Politico today, Jim VandeHei and David Paul Kuhn come down pretty hard on Clinton:

Clinton has overseen two major staff shake-ups in two months. She has left a trail of unpaid bills and unhappy vendors and had to loan her own campaign $5 million to keep it afloat in January. Her campaign badly underestimated her main adversary, Barack Obama, miscalculated the importance of organizing caucus states and was caught flat-footed after failing to lock up the nomination on Super Tuesday.

It would be easy to dismiss all of this as fairly conventional political stumbling â€" if she hadn’t made her supreme readiness and managerial competence the central issue of her presidential campaign.

As I've already noted, I think running a campaign effectively is not necessarily an indicator that a person will be great at being CEO of a sprawling federal bureaucracy. But running a campaign ineffectively certainly isn't a good sign.