Obama and Competence

If Barack Obama has exhibited one attribute during the last grueling 18 months, it’s competence.

Everyone keeps focusing on experience. Well, Obama has already done what the “experienced” George H.W. Bush and Bob Dole could not do: beat the Clintons.

He did it by running a highly competent and tightly managed campaign. Obama and his team figured out that to win the Democratic primary they needed to keep a steely gaze focused on the prize: the delegate count. Meanwhile his “more experienced” opponent wrongly focused on a swift win on Super Tuesday and couldn’t change course even when the mistake was obvious to all.

Obama has the same management team today that he had when he announced in Springfield, Illinois. Hillary had to replace her management team. McCain has replaced or reorganized his twice.

Obama keeps his cool. His opponents keep creating drama. You can disagree with Joe Biden, but no one doubts the competency of Obama’s selection process.

The Obama campaign is modern, integrating new communication technology like social networking and turning it into real world results. His campaign has mastered the tools of the trade, traditional and new. The McCain campaign has at the top a leader who doesn’t know basic skills like email or Google. His campaign doesn’t seem to know the difference between Walter Reed Army Medical Center and Walter Reed Middle School.

Obama has displayed prized superior management skills: visionary leadership, clear direction, strategic focus, expert implementation, the ability to communicate clearly in a way that mobilizes the masses. All skills we would expect in a capable chief executive.

Experience as defined by McCain and status quo Washington has given us Katrina, the intelligence disaster of pre-Iraq war and the planning disaster of post Saddam Hussein Iraq. All the experience of Washington hasn’t been able to capture Osama Bin Laden.

I don’t agree with Barack Obama on all of his policy positions, particularly on domestic policy. But in these dangerous times, I want a chief executive who is competent and who can lead others to implement his vision.. Obama has demonstrated that type of competence through this campaign and throughout his adult life. He is a rags-to-riches story personified – born in a broken home and rising in racially divided America by pulling himself up by his own bootstraps to national prominence. It’s a story that should be celebrated as solidly American – to be successful through hard work, courage, determination, and concern for others.




Consider the GOP’s founding president, Abraham Lincoln. Born in poverty to an illiterate and unsuccessful farmer, he rose by willpower and wits in 1860 to be the toast of what would now be called the liberal media, earning the praise of the east coast press after an eloquent and inspired speech at Cooper’s Union in Manhattan. Today’s Republican Party would call him an elitist. After all, he represented the powerful corporate railroads in Illinois and lived in a fancy Springfield home.

Like most people, and unlike the current leadership of the GOP who sneer at Obama’s Horatio Algers success, I was taught that if I worked hard, used my brains and applied true grit, I could be successful in life. The Republicans can sneer all they want to, but Obama’s life’s story is just a good old fashioned American success story about competence.

And let’s add that Obama’s competency isn’t the soulless nuts and bolts efficiency of a mere technocrat. Added to Obama’s skills is a vision he has articulated in a way to inspire millions to his cause: one united America that looks past the differences that divide us. Here too he emulates Lincoln, who, on the brink of the civil war, didn’t appeal to northern anger by demonizing southern aggression. Rather, Lincoln called on us to listen to “the better angels of our nature.”

Obama doesn’t have the type of experience the McCain campaign thinks he should have.

He has something better, which he has demonstrated over and over.

He has competence. The competence we need in an American president in the 21st century.