FSTDT Forums
Community => Politics and Government => Topic started by: armandtanzarian on November 05, 2012, 09:00:16 am
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Ezra Klein of the Washington Post recently detailed something I think falls in line with some I've believed about businessmen-politicians for some time, like Romney: The skills and motives don't match up. Klein parses it as a piece to understand Mitt's thought processes and motives, and while can't find the latter, the former still gives us enough clues, to which I can confidently say, Mitt wants to be president because he wants to.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/wp/2012/11/04/why-does-mitt-romney-want-to-be-president/
This is a confusing statement until you compare it with the life stories of Obama, Biden and even Ryan. While all also see politics as a career path, all have an purpose or vision that pushes them from mere career to calling. Ryan, for example, hasn't really hid his mission statement of paring government down to an Objectivist ideal. Mitt, however, doesn't seem to have such a vision.
This has made Romney’s politics something of a puzzle. Washington has its empiricists and its data-hounds, but most who enter public service do so because they want to apply that data to a grand purpose. They like their data, but they’re in politics because they care about ideology, or a party, or at least a particular issue. “Concept” doesn’t begin to describe it.
This data-first mindset is common and even celebrated in business because you're allowed quite a bit of leeway in achieving your goals, which usually consists of making profits (everything else is auxilliary to that), so you go with the wind and what's the "best" way to do it. In politics you can't do that; often you have a vision and then you start to see what you can do to make it so. Because of that and who your stakeholders are, the two don't mix. Businesses only exist to make profit, and their time horizons are often too short for any sort of long-term, earth shaking change. Policy often does things that make no tangible profit, but benefit society in the long run.
This mindset is wonderfully detailed in the piece, its worth a read. But the gist is that, for all his political life, Romney has taken a market-tested idea of what he should be and run with it. He's doing it again now, hence the flip-flopper accusation; in business, you have to often reverse course to save your ass, and its the only world he knows. A president Romney will be no different, looking for the easiest way to achieve his goals and the country's, if any. Those goals are vague, but chances are they'll be the same goals that the Republicans now hold, hoisted upon him and without which, he'll be more hamstrung than Obama.
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Further ammunition to the argument that the government cannot, by its merest levels, cannot be run like a business. INterseting stuff, minus that.
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How many CEOs have to deal with an elected congress?
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A politician's event horizon extends only to the receipt of his next bribe.
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How many CEOs have to deal with an elected congress?
They have to deal with hostile management. But keep in mind a government has checks and balances a business doesn't have. A President/CEO/Majority-Owner can be the king of his own domain, the only thing in his way usually being government regulation.