Huffington Magazine Issue 20 | Page 29

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