Politics as business

Frank Rich in today's NYT has a devastating critique of the Clinton campaign, comparing it to the war in Iraq. 

It's an apt comparison on several levels. The level that interests me has sort of a business angle. For all of the candidates' policy talk, the president doesn't actually control policy. The president is in charge of the executive branch of the federal government -- the largest organization in the world. Its budget and complexity dwarf the largest multinational firms. It manages inputs of tax dollars into a daunting variety of outputs – wars, environmental protection, air traffic control.

Like other organizations, the government attempts to bring order out of the world's essential chaos. Without organizations we have entropy. People try to anticipate the unpredictable, or design mechanisms that are flexible enough to deal with the unforeseen. Success or failure depends on how well they do these tasks. In a business, the unforeseen includes the emergence of a brand new type of competitor, or a new state of the world that renders existing products irrelevant or obsolete. In government it could be a new geopolitical reality or a new type of terrorism.

Now let's evaluate the Clinton organization.  Rich notes, among other things, that the Clinton campaign assumed it would wrap up the nomination by Super Tuesday and then, astoundingly, had no plan or ability to react when it did not do so:

In the last battleground, Wisconsin, the Clinton campaign was six days behind Mr. Obama in putting up ads and had only four campaign offices to his 11. Even as Mrs. Clinton clings to her latest firewall — the March 4 contests — she is still being outhustled. Last week she told reporters that she “had no idea” that the Texas primary system was “so bizarre” (it’s a primary-caucus hybrid), adding that she had “people trying to understand it as we speak.” Perhaps her people can borrow the road map from Obama’s people.

In Vermont, another March 4 contest, The Burlington Free Press reported that there were four Obama offices and no Clinton offices as of five days ago. For what will no doubt be the next firewall after March 4, Pennsylvania on April 22, the Clinton campaign is sufficiently disorganized that it couldn’t file a complete slate of delegates by even an extended ballot deadline. This is the candidate who keeps telling us she’s so competent that she’ll be ready to govern from Day 1. Mrs. Clinton may be right that Mr. Obama has a thin résumé, but her disheveled campaign keeps reminding us that the biggest item on her thicker résumé is the health care task force that was as botched as her presidential bid.

Rich compares Clinton to Tracy Flick, the anti-hero played by Reese Witherspoon in Election. But that's actually unfair – to Tracy Flick, who ran a resourceful even if morally questionable campaign.

A virtue of our political system as it is operated today is that it ensures that no one can be elected president who cannot run a major organization. This may not be enough – Bush ran two smooth campaigns but has had more trouble running a war. But it should at least be the price of admission.

And candidates should keep all this in mind before they go bashing "big business." If the candidates can't achieve the same level of competence as the firms they bash in bringing order out of chaos, they should just stay in the Senate and let others do the more important jobs.

Comments

[save_the_rustbelt]

The campaign appears to be managed in much the same way as the infamous health care task force, and will likely produce the same results.

Maybe when you do something as important as running for President you need to dump the cronies by the side of the road.

[Tom Grey - Liberty Dad]

The need for "organizational competence" is even more important than an entrepreneur's ideas or drive.

This is under-discussed and under-studied in economics, and not quite explained well by MBA folk. In fact, with big bucks coming from buyouts, the org competence is being ignored somewhat.

And, in the EA buyout case, the product is more important; yet the vulnerability to a hostile takeover is because of less org competence.