The latest attempt by the McCain campaign to justify the pick of Sarah Palin is to point to her advantage in “executive experience” over Barack Obama, including this, posted on the McCain web site:

“She’s the Governor of Alaska and was the mayor of a small town, meaning she has more executive experience than Barack Obama and Joe Biden put together.”

If the McCain people want to talk about executive experience, let’s look at what Barack Obama’s actions as an executive have managed to accomplish in the last 18 months.

* He has put together, from scratch, a political organization of nearly 1,000 employees that has to-date raised approximately $300 million through a network of 1.8 million donors, a major portion of whom made contributions of $200 or less.

* He has defeated the most powerful political machine in the country, the Clintons, which began this campaign with more advantages than possibly any campaign has ever had.

* He put together a campaign staff that outsmarted and out-maneuvered the Clinton team at every turn, building a grass-roots organization, not only in Iowa, but in the states following Super Tuesday, which allowed him to build a delegate lead that Hillary was never able to overcome.

* His campaign has changed forever the way a major presidential campaign is financed. This, from Rolling Stone:

“The size and scale and sophistication of the Obama enterprise — it’s like a multinational corporation compared to the mom-and-pop nonprofits of previous Democratic campaigns,” says Simon Rosenberg, president of the progressive think tank NDN and a veteran of Bill Clinton’s 1992 run. “And it isn’t just bigger — it’s a better model, it’s more democratic, it taps into the power and passion of everyday people.”

Obama has built “an amazingly strong machine,” says Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, president of the Chief Executive Leadership Institute at the Yale School of Management. “People expected a more ad hoc, impromptu, entrepreneurial feel to it. It has been more of a well-orchestrated symphony than the jazz combo we expected.”

Pretty impressive “executive experience” if you ask me. The way I see it, Barack Obama has more executive experience than John McCain and Sarah Palin put together.