Voices
should it be. Businessmen make
money, and Mr. Romney made a lot
of it. Presidents must make policy.
Money and policy are not the same
thing because making money is a
straightforward proposition while
managing a nation requires attention to far more complexities.
The goal of a CEO is to maximize shareholder value, a small
objective, really, because in being so narrowly focused a CEO
can effectively ignore many of the
larger implications of the choices
he or she makes. Presidents can’t.
Nor are we shareholders—we are
citizens, and the value of that is
measured in far more complicated
and important ways than any corporate ledger can register.
More fundamentally, corporate
CEOs operate in an environment
that is the antithesis of democracy.
None of us gets to vote on the performance of Jaime Dimon or even
Mark Cuban, despite how the decisions they make might affect our
communities and us individually.
CEOs answer only to a board—appointed rather than elected—and
they exercise executive authority without any democratic set of
checks and balances. The president
represents merely one-third of the
governing apparatus of the nation.
STEVEN
CONN
HUFFINGTON
10.28.12
That’s how the Founders wanted it.
Which might explain why “businessmen” have never made particularly good presidents.
Across two centuries Americans have generally preferred men
with military experience (think
Washington, Jackson, Grant, Eisenhower), or people with significant
political experience
who started out in the
law (Madison, LinRather
coln, Obama, among
than demand
others). In the 19th
the country be
century no president
run more like
came to office touting
a business,
that he was a “busilet’s ask what
nessman,” and it isn’t
might happen
clear that any such
if businesses
person would ever
were run like a
have been elected.
government.”
None of the Great
Robber Barons ever
tossed into electoral politics—not
John D. Rockefeller or Cornelius
Vanderbilt or J. P. Morgan.
And perhaps 19th-century
Americans were displaying real
wisdom by not being too impressed by businessmen.
In the last 100 years Americans
have only elected two presidents
who lauded their own experience in
the business world, and the results
weren’t pretty. In 1928, Herbert