Just When You Thought You'd Heard Everything

You get arch-Conservative Weekly Standard founder and Editor William Kristol writing an op-ed piece in this morning's New York Times that begins with this line: "It's time for John McCain to fire his campaign." He then goes on to say the following:

He has nothing to lose. His campaign is totally overmatched by Obama’s. The Obama team is well organized, flush with resources, and the candidate and the campaign are in sync. The McCain campaign, once merely problematic, is now close to being out-and-out dysfunctional. Its combination of strategic incoherence and operational incompetence has become toxic.

I'll only make this point. Presidential campaigns are headed up by people who aspire to become the nation's chief executive. Often the manner in which those campaigns are strategized, organized and executed is the only glimpse of the person's executive ability that voters have. In the case of these two senators, it is the only example. Suggesting that the problem lies with "the campaign" instead of with its leader is a little like suggesting the board should have fired every H-P employee instead of realizing Carly Fiorina was not the right executive to make the company profitable. As for Mr. Kristol, can you imagine what his column would have sounded like if the two candidates' "campaigns" were in opposite straits?

Comments

[Bill D.]

Its really hard to believe that Kristol still has a job. Here's a great article by Andrew Sullivan on him.
http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2008/06/re-reading-kris.html

It seems he's the man behind the curtain that made the Palin VP choice happen too.

His boy from the Weekly Standard, Michael Goldfarb, has been nothing short of a disaster as a spokesperson and blogger for McCain and should have been fired months ago.

Bill Kristol has done more to hurt the Republican party than just about anyone other than Karl Rove and GWB.

I love your point about how the campaigns are run reflects quite a bit about the candidates. Obama in both the primary and the general has had well thought out, detailed strategies that have been at odds with the conventional wisdom. His ground game is likely to make the recent polling numbers look kind to McCain. And the decentralized management strategy his team uses with its field operations is a great preview of how his administration would be run: out in the open, empowering smart people, trying to rise above the bile of everyday politics.

We are hopefully entering the waning days of the most elitist administration in quite some time. So few folks making so many decisions and keeping all the information to themselves because they are the only one's to be trusted to run the country. That management strategy has probably more important to their failures than the ideas that drove their policies because it isolated them from reality in too many critical instances. The latest example is Paulson saying everything is fine 4 months ago. WOW!

[Tom Guarriello]

I, too, believe Obama's leadership style would be dramatically different from Bush's. Obama is an emotionally mature, level-headed man, something we haven't seen in the White House since George H.W. Bush. I'm looking forward to once again having a president we can respect. While John McCain has many admirable qualities, his campaign has revealed a facet of his character that I find deeply troubling: a willingness to forgo long-standing principles in the name of expediency.

[Ken G.]

I thought HP did fire every employee before getting around to Carly... Or did it just seem that way?

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