Mitt Romney says his experience in business best qualifies him to be president. He made himself very, very rich by creating and operating Bain Capital, a company that specialized in taking over ailing businesses and nursing them back to life or allowing them to die natural, but profitable, deaths.
The Obama campaign has focused on that claim, as it should, since it is the bedrock of Romney’s own case.
Obama has said Bain sent thousands of well-paying American jobs to China in 2000 and 2001. Romney said his name was on the Bain masthead while those jobs were shipped abroad but he was turning the company over to his partners at the time and was not responsible for the decisions made.
Rather than dwell on the particulars of Bain Capital and its machinations, a more pertinent question is whether experience in business is the best qualification for the presidency. U.S. history doesn’t give that theory much credibility.
Herbert Hoover, whose one-term presidency in 1928-32 doomed the Republican Party for decades, may have been the most successful businessman ever to hold the office.
For whatever combination of reasons, most of the outstanding presidents in our nation’s history gained their expertise in governing by serving in lesser governmental positions such as governorships. Others, such as Dwight D. Eisenhower, gained the public fame that propelled them into the presidency in other public fields.
Fundamental to the art of governing in a democracy is the ability to accommodate the views and convictions of others. Equally important is the ability to choose outstanding men and women to serve in the cabinet and then to work with those co-administrators in harmony.
Captains of industry, in contrast, are by nature autocrats. They are accustomed to having their decisions carried out. They are not natural compromisers. They tend not to appoint co-workers who might become competitors for authority. When they are right, their companies succeed. When they are wrong, they are replaced and disappear, a process which happens much more abruptly in industry than can occur in the elected offices of our government.
The point is that the United States of America is not a giant corporation that can be administered as though it were IBM or Google. The skills and personal attributes that lead to business success are not transferable to the presidency. That isn’t to say that a good business man cannot become a capable governor or president. But it is to argue that making a ton of money by reorganizing sick corporations is just as likely to give a man a false sense of his ability to solve America’s problems as it is to turn him into the next Abraham Lincoln — who, incidentally, never was much of a business success.
— Emerson Lynn, jr.
