Running a private equity firm is NOTHING like running a country! The candidate I’m alluding to is just the latest to trumpet his private sector experience, not seeming to understand that government IS NOT a business.
I assume you are talking about Romney. I think the idea is that government should be run like a business - be efficient in the same way, make money, have short term goals. Actually, I would think that Romney’s experience with the Olympics is far more relevant. There he had to balance competing interest groups without the ability to fire all the people causing problems.
Here in California the voters soundly defeated this proposition, defeating two former CEOs, one reasonably competent and the other wildly incompetent.
I’ve always wondered what happens when a CEO assume political power, takes office, and then discovers that she cannot fire the state legislature, and that they give her a lot more trouble than her Board of Directors ever did.
I think another thing is the concept that the private sector is more sink or swim than the public sector- if you’re successful in the private sector, then being successful at the (easier?) public sector should be a piece of cake.
This assumes that public sector jobs, promotions and success aren’t as merit based or sink-or-swim as those in the private sector, which is definitely debatable.
Voyager-Yes, I’m refering to Mitt, and I think I agree that salvaging the SLC Games is more relevent to being POTUS.
It’s trumpeted by the Republican party because that’s where a lot of their people come from.
It doesn’t matter if private sector experience actually translates to good elected officials. Convincing people it does leads to more people willing to vote for their candidates.
Of course, a government is not supposed to make money, and is supposed to focus on long-term goals.
He ain’t got a chance. His pizza sucks.
His product sucks, but he STILL makes millions. That makes him a better CEO than those slackers who have good products.
But he would still make a terrible president.
Republicans are also more inclined to the idea that the government is always part of the problem. This is already a negative for people who are saying this while supposedly trying to become part of the government. And it makes it difficult for a Republican to use government experience (outside of military service) as a credential for getting elected. So private sector experience becomes the default credential.
But you see, at that point, no one was going to let the SLC games go down in flames, either.
SLC never should have been picked. They didn’t have the facilities to host the games. But they bribed the IOC officials with gifts, money and in some cases, hookers, and got the nod, and it became painfully obvious they weren’t ready. And if it all fell apart, it would be a major embarrassment to all involved, especially the Mormon Church (which runs politics in Utah.)
So in comes Romney and his Rolodex to save the day.
He was able to solve the problem because it was obvious what the problem was and how to fix it.
To answer the original post.
For a very long time, businesses have promoted the notion that Business is efficient, and government is inefficient. Of course, big businesses and governments have the same basic problem, they are so large that so many factors can go wrong. Having worked in both the public and private sectors, you usually have the same mixture of good and bad, smart and dumb, you get anywhere in society. You have very dedicated people who work hard, you have guys who are getting by, and you have guys who are totally worthless but never seem to get fired.
The problem is, businesses have convinced you that the government is only made up of the last group, while they are only made up of the first group.
Which is BS if you ever worked in an office anywhere.
What, you don’t like tomato flavored cardboard?
I agree with what’s been posted, and I’d add that in a way, it’s just touting leadership experience, “the ability to make tough decisions,” and so on. Romney is also putting a very rosy spin on what his firm did. While Romney made a ton of money in the private sector, let’s also not forget that some candidate try to use business experience in a campaign even if they can’t say they’ve had business success. 
I’m hard pressed to think of an extremely successful businessperson who was also an extremely successful elected official. Michael Bloomberg, maybe, but who else?
I would add a slightly different take on it - many GOP candidates touts private sector experience because it’s what they have. It’s not like Herman Cain has any other experience to tout, right?
Add in a healthy dislike for government (and the inevitable compromises that come with being a governor), and it’s easy to see why Mitt Romney would rather talk about running the Olympic committee than running one of the most liberal states in the union.
One other factor in the GOP supporting candidates with business experience is that the GOP’s financial base is big business, and part of their platform has always been making things easier for businesses. The people who are most likely to believe in tax breaks for businesses, reducing regulation, etc., are people whose experience is in business, so the GOP has an interest in supporting them.
I personally agree with the OP that business experience, aside from general leadership ability, has little or nothing to do with the ability to successfully govern.
I’m not going to dispute that Romney did a good job running the Salt Lake Organizing Committee. But does running an Olympic committee really qualify as private sector experience? It’s not like it was competing with other committees to manage the games.
But for the record, Romney does have legitimate experience in the private sector running Bain Capital.
Quoth Little Nemo:
You could take this further. Since Republicans think that government is the problem, what they want is someone who can run the government into the ground. So they naturally seek out people who have experience in running other things into the ground. So we end up with folks like George W. Bush.
The question you’re asking is when did the Republican party become the party of business interests? The short answer is: it always has been.
Brace yourself. Here comes the long answer.
After the Civil War, the Republicans were by far the dominant party. This is also the period when businesses start really growing and the economy turned into a manufacturing-based one, By the turn of the century, more than 300 industries had been consolidated into trusts each dominated by a few individuals, each of whom therefore had unbelievable piles of money and the delusions of grandeur that go with money. People who think that Congress and the states have poor representatives today have zero comprehension of history. The moguls literally bought entire legislatures to pass their laws and hurt their enemies, and many of them got themselves appointed to the Senate when legislatures still did that.
In a spasm of justice, Congress passed the Sherman Anti-Trust Act in 1893 - under a Democratic president. It was ignored. That set up the election of 1896, one of the few real turning point elections. Cutting through the thick blather that’s been poured on, the reduced version is simple. McKinley was the hand-picked candidate of the business interests, led by Mark Hanna. William Jennings Bryon was the apostle of the working man. The workers had gotten themselves hugely into debt after the Panic of 1893. They wanted large amounts of inflation to make it easier to pay back what they owed. This was economic craziness and they properly got trounced for it.*
Exit the Populists, enter the Progressives. They had saner goals to make the workplace and the country better, safer, and more egalitarian. The New Deal and our entire present understanding of government is based on this. But they won only because of the accidents of history that allowed Teddy Roosevelt to become president, after which he had to battle a conservative business Senate every step of the way.
After a short Democratic interlude when Roosevelt and Taft split the Republicans and Wilson snuck in, the 1920s were all business all the time. That also sank the country and Roosevelt led the Democrats to ascendancy. The Republicans still had moderate, even liberal wings until the 50s, but have slowly been cutting them out of the party.
So why did ordinary non-plutocrats vote for Republicans? The Democrats had bad odors clinging to them. First they were the party of slavery and then of Southern backwardness. In the North they were the party of the majority immigrants and ethnics that led to the booming growth of cities. Then, as much as today, rural voters hated the cities, those sinkholes of sin, liquor, and people who Weren’t Like Us. (Red states still have Democrats winning most of the large cities.) Until the one man, one vote laws of the 60s, legislatures were gerrymandered to ensure rural dominance.
After the 60s, social conservatism became the beat of the Republican base’s heart, but the business interests still ran the party. The inherent conservatism of business, which prefers monopolism over any other ism, meshed well with their beliefs. They all hated Democrats, at least the perceived stereotype of them, equally. Creating jobs, cutting costs, performing efficiently, were excuses that allowed the cognitive dissonance of voting for people whose actual interests in terms of deeds and bills passed did not actually mesh with their personal needs. That government is the antithesis of business and needs to be run in a totally different fashion by people of a totally different mindset is irrelevant. Few people know what it takes to run either.
The fun in the next year will be all those reports showing that Romney made his money by slashing jobs and causing businesses to go bankrupt, making him the reality behind the picture of the evil businessman of caricature that is taking jobs away from Americans. How the Republicans voters will handle that reversal will be the stuff of dissertations for a long time.
*Why the right today, in identical economic circumstances, hate the idea of inflation and want the deflation of reduced spending is a mystery. The Populists at least understood what would be good for them personally if not the country as a whole.
It doesn’t matter. As soon as they get elected, they get assimilated, Borg-like, becoming just one more drone in the hive mind of government bureaucracy.
I experienced this over the last two years when then Mayor Fenty appointed an innovative and aggressive young man as our new agency director. Bryan Sivak was the founder of InQira (a dot-com software company), and was supposed to bring in some fresh new private sector ideas. He came in with some grand ideas, and tried his best to change the way government works by eliminating inefficiencies and envisioning new & innovative ways to do business. Cloud computing was one of ideas he seemed to like the most. I attended many a meeting with Sivak, and I really liked the cut of his jib. But I thought most of his ideas were simply too progressive. As I listed to him, I often thought to myself “yeah, good luck with that”.
There were some small victories but in the end, the machinery of government was simply too big and too complex to be changed in any meaningful way. As per standard procedure, Sivak tendered his resignation when Mayor Gray took office, even though it took Gray five months to appoint a replacement. During those five months the agency was essentially headless and, as you might expect from a headless beast with a hundred legs, wandering randomly in a hundred different directions. I am unhappy to report that we are now back to government as usual.
Edit: An interesting post-script, I notice that Sivak has become Maryland’s new Chief Innovation Officer. It will be interesting to see if he has better luck there.