Sure, campaigns are a grind, but that's the point

By WALTER R. MEARS, AP Special Correspondent Fri Jul 18, 5:53 AM ET

CHAPEL HILL, N.C. - OK, American presidential campaigns are too long, too costly, too negative. But those marathons can deliver valuable and widely overlooked insights into the people who seek the White House. Running for president is a test of management that has a lot in common with doing the job.

It forces a candidate to design a strategy, shape the tactics to achieve it, select skilled and trustworthy lieutenants and advisers, deal with inflated political egos and know when to insist and when to compromise. Those are skills vital to any successful president.

Political attention is, appropriately, focused on what the candidates say they want to do as president. But leadership does not begin on Inauguration Day; it is tested over the course of the long campaign.

The managers and strategists a candidate chooses are an early measure of that leadership.

Amid the current uninformed speculation about short lists of vice presidential prospects, there is talk that Republican John McCain needs a running mate with economic credentials to strengthen him on that issue and that Democrat Barack Obama will have to find one with foreign policy and defense experience for the same reason. That might help a bit during the campaign. But the men and women they already have advising them are likely to have more impact on policy once one or the other takes the White House.

Finding the right people, and keeping them on message, is a piece of on-the-job training for the presidential candidates. Both McCain and Obama have had problems with their aides and stand-in campaigners. The difficulty in the campaign and eventually in an administration is that people skilled enough to be useful advisers and surrogates are experienced, opinionated and likely to talk out of turn.

That's why former Sen. Phil Gramm, who said that Americans were whiners about economic woes, is no longer a top adviser to the McCain campaign. He'd been billed as a potential treasury secretary. After that episode, McCain said maybe he'd make him ambassador to Belarus.

He hasn't exiled Carly Fiorina, the campaign ally whose complaints about health insurance that covers Viagra but not birth control pills led him to be asked that question, which he awkwardly dodged. McCain's look wasn't just deer in the headlights. It was like the deer who saw the headlights too late.

Obama had his own flaps — the former foreign policy adviser who called Hillary Clinton a monster, not while doing anything for him but while promoting a book in London. She quickly quit the campaign. Earlier, an economist who had been advising the campaign mouthed off to Canadian diplomats not to worry about Obama's reservations on trade treaties because they were just politics. And his longtime preacher, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, turned up on tape ranting against America, then in person defending what he'd said. At that point, after waiting too long, Obama broke with him.

Surrogates and advisers who talk their way off the campaign reservation are a special problem for these nominees because anything they say is trumpeted, rerun, discussed and replayed over and over in the nonstop cycle of television commentary.

As uncomfortable as that is now, it is not bad training for a president, who will have a far larger array of advisers and appointees to manage. Let any of them run at the mouth and it becomes a distracting problem for the administration.

Reacting, and quickly, to repair the damage and cut the losses is among the lessons of a presidential campaign. So is the need for strategies, to deal with issues and to counter and outdo the opposition.

That gets back to choosing advisers and managers to oversee campaign operations. Not even winning candidates always get that right the first time. McCain, the early favorite, faltered and almost ran out of money before he overhauled his team in 2007. More recently he did it again, this time to try to strengthen and focus a sometimes muddled campaign message.

Hillary Clinton overhauled her campaign team after her loss to Obama in Iowa. She dumped the strategist who designed a front-runner campaign without the fallback plan she needed against the surprise rise of Obama. But her campaign never overcame those missteps.

Obama's team proved the strongest and so far, the most stable. Even when the polls put him far behind Clinton, his advisers stuck to the Obama message of hope and change. It fit and it worked.

They also put together a vast and unmatched fundraising operation. In spurning federal campaign funding and its limits, Obama said he has a roster of 1.5 million donors.

Obama is the first nominee to reject the federal allowance since it began in 1976. By doing so, he avoids the spending limits that go with the $84.1 million McCain will get from the government.

He also takes on a new management test as his campaign seeks private donations to outdo what McCain will get from the government and what the Republican Party will be spending on behalf of the ticket.

___

EDITOR'S NOTE — Walter R. Mears has reported on presidential campaigns for The Associated Press since 1960. He is retired and lives in Chapel Hill, N.C.