{"id":5513,"date":"2008-09-01T20:39:38","date_gmt":"2008-09-01T20:39:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=5513"},"modified":"2008-09-01T20:39:38","modified_gmt":"2008-09-01T20:39:38","slug":"executive-experience","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=5513","title":{"rendered":"executive experience"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I was thinking about the charge that Barack Obama lacks executive experience: they say he has even less than Governor Palin. It occurred to me that a modern presidential campaign is a rather large enterprise of which the candidate is the executive. That thought sent me to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.opensecrets.org\/pres08\/expend.php?cycle=2008&#038;cid=N00009638\">OpenSecrets.org<\/a>, which provides some handy charts of campaign contributions and expenditures. Obama has raised about $390 million so far and spent $312 million. That&#8217;s a lot less than the $4.3 billion annual budget of Alaska; but it&#8217;s a lot of money, and he controls it all directly. He&#8217;s spent a little less than half&#8211;$152 million&#8211;on media, the vast majority of that on broadcast. I don&#8217;t know how many people he employs, but he has spent $40 million on salaries, not counting consultants and vendors. This whole enterprise is an enormous start-up, operating in a highly competitive environment and under relentless scrutiny. One can debate whether running such an operation is a good test of the skills required of a president. That it represents &#8220;executive experience&#8221; seems clear.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I was thinking about the charge that Barack Obama lacks executive experience: they say he has even less than Governor Palin. It occurred to me that a modern presidential campaign is a rather large enterprise of which the candidate is the executive. That thought sent me to OpenSecrets.org, which provides some handy charts of campaign [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5513","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5513","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5513"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5513\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5513"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5513"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5513"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}