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Romney was a one-term governor, but he is surely the 24-carat chief executive officer. There are huge differences in skills required to be a successful CEO and a president of the United States. Presidents, for example, have to make life-and-death decisions that go beyond spreadsheets.

A photo of Mitt Romney splashed across the cover of a recent Economist under the title “America’s next CEO” was a bit unsettling. Not because Mr. Romney isn’t qualified to be president, but because America’s main need is for a public servant, not a corporate executive.

A photo of Mitt Romney splashed across the cover of a recent Economist under the title “America’s next CEO” was a bit unsettling. Not because Mr. Romney isn’t qualified to be president, but because America’s main need is for a public servant, not a corporate executive.

Business acumen does not magically translate into skillful management of the US economy. Recall, George W. Bush was touted as America’s first president with an MBA. Now, according to a January Washington Post/ABC News poll, 54 percent of Americans believe the current economic problems are Mr. Bush’s fault while only 29 percent blame President Obama.

In truth, the Great Recession has a long history, but Bush greatly exacerbated the problem with lax oversight of the financial sector and business-as-usual at mortgage lenders Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. And he boosted America’s debt with unpaid wars and an unfunded prescription drug benefit.

CEOs tend to be single-minded people who clear mine fields. The mines they want cleared are taxes and government regulations. The last thing a successful CEO wants is any oversight of Wall Street.

Business moguls generally have scant public records. Their jobs require little sense of civic virtue – the obligation to seek the public good and habitually act rightly. By contrast, the CEO’s culture tends to be draconically secretive. The CEO thinks his tax return is not in the public domain. The politician knows that not even his sex life is off limits.

A friend who votes Republican more often than not said, “To a CEO, all life is reduced to the abstract, if not the amoral, collecting information, then going down the road to bigger profit, a world in which all issues are reduced to spreadsheets.”

Ronald Reagan would have made a lousy CEO. He was once accused of practicing “voodoo economics.” But the gavotte he performed with Mikhail Gorbachev, reducing superpower arsenals and hastening the end of the cold war, could only have been performed by a brilliant actor, with a great supporting cast.

Reagan also possessed a crucial quality that seems to be habitually absent from single-minded CEOs: He really liked people and could charm the bark off a tree. Elected public servants have symbiotic relationships with the citizenry, and they know how to read polls and the public pulse.

A CEO who finds disloyalty cuts off its head, not an option always available to elected officials in government. A US president has to work with adversaries, forcing him to be an accommodator or a horse trader. From Day 1, Mr. Obama has had to work with a Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell, who has vowed his sole mission is to make sure Obama is a one-term president.

Many conservatives wanted to allow a bankrupt General Motors to go under. But Obama, more skilled in politics than capitalism, bailed out GM. Now, born-again General Motors is once more the world’s largest automaker, selling 9 million vehicles, outpacing even Toyota.

Presidents have to make tough, life-and-death decisions that go beyond a financial statement. Commander in chief Obama has several times overruled Pentagon brass. For instance, when Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi’s forces were poised to massacre the city of Benghazi, Obama interceded. He joined a NATO coalition preventing the feared Benghazi bloodbath, ultimately deposing an Arab despot, without the loss of a single American life.

Despite others’ hesitation, a gutsy Obama also ordered a Navy SEAL team to take out another mass murderer, Osama bin Laden.

Obama may seem a disappointment to many who voted for him, but in three years it has become clear he thinks through his decisions, beyond profit and loss statements. And to his credit, he also seems to consider all points of view.

At a time when corporate power in this country is greater than at any point since the 1880s and ’90s, America requires leaders with careers heavy in public service rather than CEOs. I suspect there are hundreds of CEOs who believe they are better qualified to be president than either the Republican candidates or Obama. But why elect a fox to guard the chicken coop after the worst economic recession since the 1930s? http://www.csmonitor.com/Commentary/Walter-Rodgers/2012/0131/A-CEO-as-
US-president-America-is-not-a-business-Mitt-Romney

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Not true, Mitt Romney: History shows business experience doesn't make a good president

Mitt Romney has derided President Obama for lacking the business experience he claimed as 'essential to his task.' That's a popular GOP message, but it's not true. America's best-rated presidents weren't businessmen, and those with the most business success rank among the worst.

The assumption was on vivid display at last week’s Republican National Convention, where nominee Mitt Romney – a former private equity manager – contrasted his resume to President Obama’s. “He took office without the most basic qualification that most Americans have and one that was essential to his task,” Romney said, criticizing Mr. Obama. “He had almost no experience working in a business.”

But it’s simply false to say that a business background is “essential” to succeeding as a president. Since 1900, only five of our 20 presidents had significant business experience when they entered the White House: Herbert Hoover, Harry Truman, Jimmy Carter, and the two Bushes.

Notably missing are the figures whom Americans routinely identify as the best 20th-century presidents: Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, and Ronald Reagan. Of the businessmen-presidents, indeed, only Truman usually makes it into pollsters’ Top Ten. And he was the worst businessman of the lot.

The best one was surely Hoover, who remains a symbol of presidential ineptitude for his ham-handed reaction to the 1929 stock market crash and ensuing Great Depression. Before that, however, he made millions in the global mining industry. A peripatetic traveler, he moved from Australia to China to England in search of better opportunities.

He found them, too. Logging over 5,000 miles across the Australian bush in a quest for gold, he acquired a $1 million mine that would generate $65 million for his company. In a passage that could be lifted from a Mitt Romney speech, Hoover later recalled the “sheer joy” of “creating productive enterprises” during these early years.

And like Romney, who often closed or downsized unprofitable enterprises that he acquired while at Bain Capital, Hoover often let people go in the service of the bottom line. In Australia, when some of his workers went on strike, he boasted about firing them and importing Italian laborers to take their place.

By that measure, Harry Truman was truly worthless. Investing $15,000 in a men’s clothing store in Kansas City, he lost about twice that sum and closed the store after just two years. He also tried his hand in oil drilling but failed to locate a profitable well; if he had succeeded, Truman later reflected, he would never have entered politics.

The next two businessmen-presidents, Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush, were much better at business than Harry Truman; but by most accounts, they were much worse presidents, though each had notable foreign policy triumphs. Mr. Carter actually started his own side enterprise at the ripe age of five, hawking boiled peanuts from his father’s farm on the streets of Plains, Georgia.

By the time he was nine, Carter was already speculating in cotton bales; soon after that, he started acquiring rental properties. He eventually diversified the family farm into a million-dollar-a-year business, selling fertilizer and insurance as well as peanuts.

Like Truman, meanwhile, George H.W. Bush went into the oil business; but unlike Truman, Bush actually struck oil. Starting in Texas, where his company dug 127 wells, Mr. Bush pioneered offshore drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. By the time he was 30, he was a millionaire.

His son’s business career was more checkered, buoyed by the family name as much as anything else. George W. Bush lost nearly a million dollars in an oil venture but was bailed out by another company, which enlisted him as a consultant to land lucrative drilling contracts in the Middle East. He had more success as co-owner of the Texas Rangers, earning $15 million in profits when he sold his share of the team in 1998.

But even many Republicans now rank George W. Bush as a middling-to-poor president. In a recent Gallup poll, just 46 percent of GOP respondents gave him a positive rating. That’s why the Republicans kept him under wraps at their convention.

But the Democrats made another ex-president their keynote speaker! Bill Clinton wasn’t a businessman, but he turned out to be a pretty darned good politician. So whatever you think of Barack Obama, it’s time to stop harping on his lack of entrepreneurial experience. Ronald Reagan didn’t build businesses, either, but 90 percent of Republicans regard him favorably. Go figure. More at But the Democrats made another ex-president their keynote speaker! Bill Clinton wasn’t a businessman, but he turned out to be a pretty darned good politician. So whatever you think of Barack Obama, it’s time to stop harping on his lack of entrepreneurial experience. Ronald Reagan didn’t build businesses, either, but 90 percent of Republicans regard him favorably. Go figure.

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