[NOTE: Several commenters have noted that I should really talk about Obama's executive experience heading a Senate staff and running a national campaign--which are excellent points. There's also some criticism that one should not even make the comparison between Obama and Palin--which I'm totally sympathetic to --this is offered in the spirit of countering a dumb talking point...it was also meant to be a bit tongue-in-cheek]
According to Josh Marshall, conservative blogs are making a big deal out of Palin being mayor (part-time) of Wasilla --as a measure of her "executive experience", so I thought I'd highlight this post I wrote yesterday:
When Barack Obama was President of the Harvard Law Review he likely had at least as much executive experience as Sarah Palin did as Mayor of Wasilla by at least one measure.
I count a staff of 90 individuals who currently are managed by the President of the Harvard Law Review. (I verified from a former HLR alum that the Prez actually does have managerial responsibiliy over the Board of editors).
Contrast that with City of Wasilla which from this website, I can verify have: a Mayor, Deputy Mayor, 6 City Council members, City Clerk and deputy, two members on the Finance staff, 6 members of the sports utility facility, 5 members in the Public Works Dept and likely several dozen other staff in other departments that are not specifically listed on the website. So while I don't have a hard number --maybe a reporter can dig deeper on this-- Obama running the HLR alone when he wa sin law school may have involved greater managerial activity.
Of course, when Obama was a state senator in Illinois, the population of his district which is currently at about 780,000 is more than 100 times larger than the population of Wasilla (about 6700) and larger than Alaska's entire population of about 683,000.
UPDATE: Aaron Micheal in the comments notes that:
As a former editor of the Harvard Law Review, I can tell you (1) that being President (formerly called Editor in Chief) is an enormous responsibility and time committment, and (2) that the vetting process during the HLR presidential campaign is insane.
HLR has an endowment of at least several million dollars, with a lot of that coming from its current business decisions relating to (a) advertising in the Review; (b) its contracts with LEXIS and Westlaw; and (c) its sales of The Bluebook (the citation format guide, which it publishes in coordination with Stanford, Yale, and Columbia). And the infrastructure to run the Review is pretty big. The President has a lot of responsibility to make sure the Review's business operations run smoothly, and that its expenditures (capital and otherwise) don't outpace revenues. The Review is entirely student run -- it's technically not part of Harvard Law School -- and so it's a pretty big enterprise for a student to have responsibility for.