Carter wasn’t just a hicksville peanut farmer, he had been a Navy officer, and a nuclear submarine one, too.
Has everybody forgotten that Romney was the Governor of Massachusetts? Seems like that a lot of Governors have been elected president.
Romney has spent five years trying to get everybody to forget about that. He has been campaigning largely on his business experience. That’s especially true this time around since the Republican base hates the health care plan he helped pass.
You campaign very differently to obtain your party’s nomination, than you do to win the general election. After he’s got the Repub. nomination, watch the campaign shift.
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Given our current budget situation, I would think a financier like Romney has a good background to be President.
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I would say the business experience along with the governoring experience would be a good background. Although Romney was CEO of a management consulting firm (Bain) and later co-founded a spin-off private equity firm (Bain Capital). Management consultants aren’t really known for “doin’ stuff”.
Correct on both counts. In general, effectiveness as a governor says a lot more than effectiveness as a business man - or actor.
A CEO can set budget and hiring goals top down, within the constraints of COGS. A President throws a budget at Congress and hopes for the best. A guy with experience as the CEO of a company where the various divisions screw around with their budgets might be better for a job - but of course that isn’t the way business works.
The goal of Bain was to restructure a company and sell it, and I’d say that kind of short term objective is exactly the opposite of what a president needs to do. That isn’t a moral judgment. I’ve seen this happen. When AT&T split up, Bob Allen wanted to get the headcount for the Lucent part down low enough for the books to look good for the IPO. To do this they offered a very attractive package. I made out like a bandit, but whole projects and management lines lost their best people. Those who stayed reported that it was quite a mess. So, I’m not sure that his experience with Bain is going to be very helpful. But, I do agree it is better than most of the rest of them.
As for Obama, I don’t know if he had to face down any gang bangers as a community organizer, but if he did I wish he had brought that skill to the White House, where it would have been useful dealing with Congress. His budgets are fine - you disagreeing about the benefits of stimulus is different from the budget being out of control.
But the clips from ads, debates, and speeches don’t shift. It is nice that Newt will be test driving anti-Bain ads for the Dems very shortly. A test to see what works, paid for by Republicans.
I know how this stuff works. The bottom line is that the health plan was his signature achievement in Massachusetts, and since it was the basis for the Obama plan, the Republican base absolutely hates it. Romney actually went so far as to delete a passage about it from his biography. The most Romney has been able to do is say that he thinks it was wrong on a federal level, but that doesn’t address their core objection. You always move toward the center in the general election, but since his conservative credentials are in question in the first place and always have been, he can only so much of that.
What you have to remember: Romney was a Republican governor in a Democratic state. The real power in MA is the speaker of the house-which is a position held by three convicted felons in a row (the present speaker is likely to be indicted this year).
So, Romney could propose, but the legislature blocked most of what he tried to do. Romney then tried to sponsor candidates for the state house and senate-all of them lost.
Trying to reform a corrupt state like Massachsetts is next to impossible.
That’s exactly what Romney doesn’t want people to remember, and why Gingrich has dubbed him “Mitt the Massachusetts Moderate.”
And that’s why Romney has to distance himself from his own health care plan, which was his main achievement until 2010?
Put another way: In government, the customers and the stockholders are the same people.
George W. Bush and Herman Cain were awful as business CEO’s. Cain’s pizza company lost significant market value while he ran it. Pillsbury dumped it for a huge loss.
Modern corporations are not suited to build or form great political leaders. Steve Jobs and Bill Gates were great CEO’s but would have made bad presidents. Both are control freaks who manage every process and decision and push their subordinates to excel or fire them if they don’t. Presidents never get to do that to Congress.
Nor even to the civil service. (Who are the employees; Congress is only the Board of Directors, as it were.)
What evidence is there that the personal experience or skills of a President matter at all, apart from shaping that person’s political beliefs and agenda? And if they only matter to the person’s agenda, isn’t it the agenda we should evaluate?
It is helpful to form narratives about individual Presidents because humans prefer that to the actual complex causal mechanisms that determine something like the actions and outcomes of the Presidency, but I see no evidence that Obama’s or Bush’s or Clinton’s or Reagan’s life experience or skillset had much impact on the outcomes of their Presidencies apart from making them Republicans or Democrats.
Choosing a President is 90% about choosing sides, not people. The party matters a lot. The subset of the party matters a little. And maybe the individual president’s characteristics matter for a handful of issues that might arise during the Presidency, but it’s hard to see how they matter much beyond that.
The W Admin.
It wasn’t Romney’s plan, was it? It was Massachusetts’s plan. What’s he going to run on, he lets Democrats give the undeserving medical coverage?
The people you list are all on the right, and generally adhere to a philosophy that puts success in private enterprise on a very high pedestal. So that is a big part of why they feel that way, people who succeed in superior private enterprise can bring those talents to inferior public enterprise. It isn’t a very good argument unless you believe the underlying anti-statist and pro-capitalist beliefs.
I would assume having experience as a governor is probably more important than being a CEO. The structure of how things are done is similar.
Well, what about George Soros or Warren Buffett? Would they make good politicians?
Dubya is a great example of why Presidential characteristics don’t matter. He did what pretty much every other Republican would have done post-9/11, which was listen to Cheney, Wolfowitz, and Rumsfeld, et al. Even though the country elected a guy who promised no nation-building and had little interest in foreign policy, the country got a guy for whom nearly the entirety of his legacy is foreign policy-related actions and one spectacularly poor attempt at nation-building.
Of course, we can’t know what the administration of McCain or Hatch would have done differently, but do you at least have an argument to offer?
But it took a W to have them around in the first place. Neocons were still a radical fringe of the GOP then.
Any Republican POTUS might have listened to Cheney, but it took a W to be his puppet.