The exchange between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama in the latest Democratic debate , perhaps unwittingly, brought up the core issue that has long vexed Administrative Science: “What makes a good manager?”; and perhaps the underlying question: “What makes a good leader?” Asked to name a weakness, Obama admitted:

“And as I indicated before, my greatest weakness, I think, is when it comes to -- I'll give you a very good example. I ask my staff never to hand me paper until two seconds before I need it, because I will lose it. (Laughter.) You know. The -- you know. And my desk in my office doesn't look good. I've got to have somebody around me who is keeping track of that stuff. And that's not trivial. I need to have good people in place who can make sure that systems run. That's what I've always done. And that's why we've run not only a good campaign but a good U.S. Senate office.”

Hillary Clinton didn’t miss a beat, in capitalizing on Obama’s admission:

“… I think you have to be able to manage and run the bureaucracy. You've got to pick good people certainly but you have to hold them accountable every single day.

We've seen the results of a president who frankly failed at that. You know, he went in to office saying he was going to have the kind of Harvard Business School CEO model, where he'd set the tone, he'd set the goals, and then everybody else would have to implement it. And we saw the failures. We saw the failures along the Gulf Coast with, you know, people who were totally incompetent and insensitive, failing to help our fellow Americans.”

It was a clever move on Clinton’s part, but it took liberties with what Obama actually said, and conflated several aspects of management and leadership. Obama talked about losing pieces of paper. Clinton extrapolated to holding people accountable in a bureaucracy. Yet, these are very different things. As Obama alluded to in his rebuttal, George W. Bush has not been accused of failing to keep track of pieces of paper. He has been accused of being unaware of major decisions of his administration, such as when he told author Robert Draper that

he didn’t remember why

his administration violated its own policy by dismantling the Iraqi Army; or when he was openly - and laughingly -

stumped by a student’s question

about the lack of legal accountability of military contractors in Iraq - a question proved prescient by subsequent contractor scandals. (Interestingly, in his answer, Bush began to explain how this was his idea of delegation).

He’s also been accused of lackadaisical responses to impending crises, such as when he

failed to respond

to the August, 6, 2001 Presidential Daily Briefing concerning the threat of Osama bin Laden, or when he

continued his vacation

as the Katrina disaster unfolded.