If by “effective manager” you mean someone who ordered such a fucked-up disaster of a computer system that his pol workers didn’t get the information they needed, his poll trackers of how many of his supporters were voting didn’t work, and he actually believed until the people spoke that he was leading in the election in the right states, sure.
Any CEO in a business corp who was in charge of that sort of a screw-up for a key marketing/sales software system would be canned (if the business didn’t go bankrupt first).
There’s also the fact that his campaign was heavily top-down, with only a relatively few campaign offices per state, instead of a decentralised organizational structure that took seriously the admonition that “all politics is local.”
Neither of those serious mis-steps by Romney strike me as the mark of a effective or competent manager.
Campaigning is a totally different aniimal from governing. Great campaigners have made shitty officials and people with a proven track record of management success, in business, government, or both, have often been horrible campaigners.
The reason is that in a campaign, the candidate is the product being sold. Candidates don’t run their campaigns. As a matter of fact, the guy who runs the campaign isn’t exactly a secret. There’s a reason guys like David Axelrod, Karl Rove, Lee Atwater, and James Carville are famous.
But, like any CEO, he was the one who chose the guys that he wanted to run his campaign, and delegated that task to them: the most important task if he wanted to be elected President.
And they screwed up, monumentally, on the IT side, as well as making other serious mis-steps, like not defining their guy in the public mind and letting him be cast as an out-of-touch plutocrat.
That brings into question his ability as a manager, because he chose the people who screwed up. The manager delegates jobs to others, but as the ultimate manager, he’s responsible if the people he chooses screw up.
I seem to recall a far more disastrous IT project that went wrong under someone’s watch, yet I see few calling him unqualified to occupy the office he currently occupies.
It actually sounds like you’re not just equating running a campaign with running a government, but placing MORE importance on the campaign. The fact that Romney helped save the Olympics and was a pretty successful governor means nothing because his campaign was poor? Weird.
I guess that eliminates Clinton, because her 2008 campaign was full of infighting and people pulling in all different directions, a clear sign that no one was at the helm. Or we can be sensible and blame it all on Mark Penn and Patti Solis Doyle, like good Democrats do.
To look at it another way, in the past two presidential elections, the two candidates together spent over $2 billion.
In other words, each candidate is in charge of a Billion dollar operation, charged with one task: sell their candidate to the people. To do that, their campaigns have to have the organizational and logistical chops to make it so.
That’s the people’s first real example of how good a manager the candidate is: has the candidate put together the team of people who in turn can put together that billion dollar organization to do the job?
In Romney’s case, he didn’t meet that test, because the organization he put together failed on key organizational/logistic tasks.
That’s why I’m always sceptical of claims that “Candidate X has never run a state/company/organization and never had to meet payroll.” The campaigns are huge organizations, that the candidate has to build from the ground up in a matter of a few years, all aimed at one key date in November. How the candidate does that task, of putting together the team that the candidate trusts to run the billion dollar operation, is a very good indicator of the candidate’s organizational and managerial skills, particularly the candidate’s ability to judge the skills of the people the candidate is choosing for key tasks.
That is an important aspect of the President’s job: who does the President choose for the major posts? The campaign is one way to judge that ability for the candidate for Chief Executive.
I am mindful of the moderator’s instructions and will not comment on this comment.
I am mindful of the moderator’s instructions and will not comment on this comment. If you wish to see my thought on Clinton, see post 21 in the Clinton thread.
I’m not discounting that past. That’s another factor that goes into assessing the candidate. However, neither of those examples illustrates the candidate’s ability to operate on a national scale, and to chose the people who will put together that national operation. That’s a different type of task, and is a good indicator of executive abilities.
As for Romney’s past track record as Governor of Massachusetts, I agree that is very significant. By all accounts, he was a very successful Governor, which is certainly a good point in his favour. However, it also counts against him: he used to be proud of the fact that he worked in a bi-partisan way to put together a significant health-care reform package. He won’t now disavow that health-care package, which makes many conservatives suspicious of him, but he also doesn’t say that what he did as Governor would be a good model for the country, which makes a lot of liberals distrust him. So I think talking about his time as Governor doesn’t help him much.
Everybody wants him to be remembered by the 49% quote, but my favorite quote, which I think demonstrates his tone deafness, was his cheerful “corporations are people, my friend!”
There was a Newsweek poll released on this date in 2007. John Edwards was projected to defeat Rudy Giuliani in a hypothetical presidential contest, 48% to 45%.
Personally, I think Romney’s weakness is better illustrated by the story of the dog on the road trip. The 47% comment came when he thought he was speaking to a friendly audience, and I’m not sure what the context was for “Corporations are people”. But the dog story was specifically an attempt, deliberately so intended, to make himself seem more relatable and normal. If that’s the kind of thing he comes up with when he’s trying to sound like “just ordinary folks”, then he’s hopeless.
That’s a huge weakness. The real Mitt Romney is a great guy, but he’s a great RICH guy who few can relate to. So when he tries to be anything else, he comes off as a big fake. And it’s a problem that can actually get worse, unlike statements he’s already made, which are old news. He can still find new ways to make people wonder about him.