I mean successful in bringing the project off, including successful in managing public funds for infrastructure. As opposed to a certain current President, who has demonstrated a lack of success in those areas.
Do you allege that it was wrong to use public funds? Are you saying the Olympics was unsuccessful? Or is this more “no matter what he did it was bad”.
Regards,
Shodan
If it was that easy why didn’t the previous guy do it? Yes, Romney got federal government help, but the Olympics weren’t failing just for lack of money. The Olympics were plagued by corruption and incompetence. That’s what Romney fixed.
But enough about Bush.
I allege that those who cite business success as a qualification for public office often don’t understand that the two are very different things. Romney succeeded in SLT by hiring a bunch of consultants to get money out of the US government. One can be very successful in business externalizing costs, but the same trick doesn’t work when you’re handling the federal budget.
Absolutely right. If there were videos of Bush and Cheney joining in a Satanic ritual they would have still easily carried the state.
So not having the full budget was a sign of failure until Romney took over and then not having the full budget became a sign of success.
And of course he “brought the project in on time”. It’s the Olympic games; it has an opening date. It would have been an epic failure if Romney had been the only person to have not been able to open on schedule.
And one with only 3 electoral votes, so it isn’t worth contesting.
What if the ticket was Bush/Rubio with Rubio being so confident that the GOP is going to win that he gives up his Senate seat to another republican while he runs the race to win?
Bloomberg was a registered Republican and I doubt whether any of the Republicans he gave to ever turned down his cash. And are you saying that political professionals don’t use their party as a means for their ends? The hell? Bloomberg benefited the GOP: with another candidate they wouldn’t have a chance of winning the NYC mayoral race.
I agree that the current GOP lacks the necessary neural prerequisites to nominate the sort of candidate that historically did quite well in the Northeast. Rockefeller is one example, but the same could be said for Jacob Javitz or Abraham Lincoln.
Bloomberg would be a shoo-in in November. But to win the GOP primary you either have to be crazy or simulate crazy. Bloomberg would have difficulty with that.
Bloomberg was a “republican” for about six or seven years. He switched parties to avoid the crowded democratic field in his initial run for mayor of NYC. He left the party in his second term and ran as an independent for his third. In 2012 he endorsed Obama over Romney.
If he were to run in 2016, it would be as an independent or a democrat.
I suspect that’s a result of unclear language - they were a third of a billion OVER budget (or in deficit, if you prefer) but didn’t spend all the money in Romney’s budget. That he did this by cadging $1.3 billion more out of the US government may have some relevance here.
Let’s not pretend that Romney did nothing - one of the key skills of an asset stripper is to be able to evaluate what’s of value and what isn’t and trim everything to the bone, and Romney certainly did that capably. What this doesn’t tell us is how he’d run the country, where unprofitable and inefficient government services are often critical to those people who use them.
Government doesn’t have to make a profit, but it does have to be efficient.
Yes and no. Cutting services to remote rural areas increases efficiency. Efficiency is important but not the end goal.
I’m not really arguing with you on this point; mainly, I’m saying that skills like firing people, terminating services, externalizing costs and focusing on core business only work fine in the private sector but often very badly in the public one.
You’re right except for the last one. Focusing on core strengths is a good policy for government to follow. The more “nice to have” but not essential tasks the government takes on the harder it is to do anything well. And individual agencies have a bad habit of engaging in mission creep.
Anyway, the point is that someone with a business background can contribute a lot to the job.
I disagree. Running a business is nothing like running a government, just as your family budget is nothing like the government’s. Yet uninformed people vote as if it is.
Essential is not the same thing as core. If you focus on just the core, you will neglect essential things. In businesses, this isn’t a big deal, as some other business will come along to service those essential needs. But there’s not going to be any other government taking over for the essentials a government misses (or at least, you really hope not).
I know that is an article of faith among conservatives, but is there any historical evidence that business acumen is useful in leading a country? I would think just the opposite; government leadership depends on cooperation and consensus, whereas a business is successful because it is led by a person who can unilaterally impose his vision on his employees, and the business succeeds or fails on his leadership alone. Someone who is successful in business, especially a large corporation, may likely be a spectacular failure because they expect their decisions to be the final word, which is not the case in a government with three co-equal branches and the will of the voters.
The President has two basic jobs: work with Congress to pass legislation, and run the executive branch. on the latter, he actually does work by ordering people around. So having experience ordering people around and getting actual results is useful.
The difference is in the mindset. In business, you order people around for the sole purpose of making money for your shareholders. Running a government requires doing a myriad of things that do not generate a profit. Business experience must be unlearned before one can run a government and is a net detriment.
Given how poorly the government runs, it would seem that all the lack of profit-making accomplishes is to make the leadership not care whether it works or not.
The principles of economics apply to government as well as business, and one of the most important principles of economics is the concept of incentives. Since it doesn’t matter whether or not the government works well, it won’t.
No, the lack of a profit motive is liberating- it allows decisions to be made on what is best for the public, both in short term and in long term. It might surprise you to know that there are incentives other than profit- such as measuring performance and delivering on objectives. Believe it or not, government agencies do these things.