How Will They Manage?

My colleague Matt Yglesias raises a good point about the nature of this particular presidential campaign:

The presidency, after all, involves significant managerial challenges. And neither McCain nor Barack Obama has ever been a mayor or a governor or run an executive agency. Neither has ever run a company. McCain was a Navy officer, but he didn't achieve the kind of rank where he had substantial managerial responsibilities -- he flew airplanes, he didn't command ships. For both of them, their presidential campaigns are the largest enterprises they've ever run. That's not good preparation for the White House in either case, but we don't have much else to go on.

I've noted before that I think that presidential campaigns are lousy indicators of how well a candidate would do at running the entire federal government.

We'll explore the management styles and initiatives of McCain and Obama in the September and October issues, respectively, of Government Executive. But it's not easy to pin down what they plan to do, or even to find surrogates who can talk about the management challenges facing the government. Which could make for a very interesting next four to eight years.

One thing's for sure -- the era that started 16 years ago in which candidates gave management initiatives -- from the National Performance Review to the President's Management Agenda -- a prominent place in their campaigns and their administrations, is over.