Post-Election Thought: Democrats should have picked someone from business

by philg

Despite widespread dissatisfaction with George W. Bush the Democrats managed to lose the 2004 election.  The U.S. has a population growth rate of 0.92% (source: CIA Factbook) and our population is forecast to reach 450 million by mid-century.  Thus economic (GDP) growth and job creation are essential if Americans are to enjoy a constant or rising standard of living.  Bush and Cheney weren’t our most successful business managers but they at least did work in the business world, attempting to produce economic growth and jobs.  The Democrats picked challengers who spent their entire lives working for the government or suing medical doctors for causing cerebral palsy.  These are activities that may redistribute the pie but won’t grow it.  Edwards might have been a particular weakness on this score because of the studies showing that lawyers reduce GDP.


Does anyone know of a governor or national Democratic politician who previously had a successful career in business?

27 thoughts on “Post-Election Thought: Democrats should have picked someone from business”

  2. None spring immediately to mind. What does that tell you about the sort of people who end up as Democrat leaders?

  3. Nope (although does Mark Dayton count?), but there is a well spring to draw from should any decide to quit business and take up politics. Some suggested to me are George Soros and the head of Goldman Sacks, both of which are prominate players in the democratic party, they just don’t run for office (yet). However, both parties are mostly run by lawyers and draw heavily from military and business to fill posts and stuff, the republicans are just better at this.

  4. You’ll love this one.

    Meet Mark Warner, Democratic governor of Virginia. Though he graduated from Harvard Law in 1980, he eschewed government for — wait for it — technology venture capital.

    He decided being governor might be more interesting right around, um, 2001.

  6. Actually Kerry did cofound some little bakery or chocolate shop or something. So he can be credited with creating a handfull of jobs, which is probably better than Bush and Cheney whose careers in the private sector probably resulted in a net destruction of jobs (Bush destroyed company after company while Cheney’s signature achievement at Halliburton was a merger which resulted in significant layoffs. I’m sure Halliburton has made up for it since then hiring contractors for Iraq but that’s a different story).

  7. Although his only elected office was mayor of Wilton Manors, former congressional candidate Jim Stork runs a very successful bakery & cafe. Unfortunately he left the race for health reasons. Before that he was considered one of the Democratic party’s rising stars.

  8. Cheney’s case may be instructive for the Democrats. Cheney spent his early life getting draft deferments in grad school, then climbing the ladder as a full-time political hack, going from staffer in the Ford white house to congressman in a safe republican district to sec def. When booted out of government for the first time in his life by Clinton in 1992, some of his political cronies arranged for him to be made CEO of Halliburton.

    So, the lesson is that some wealthy democrats (Soros?) ought to find some promising young democratic politicians out on their luck and offer them CEO positions in some expendable companies to build up their private sector credentials for future presidential runs.

  10. Jimmy Carter ran his family’s peanut farming business. Depending on how you look at it, Howard Dean would’ve run a small business with his medical practice.

  11. Guys, guys, what makes you think I have anything against people who worked in venture capital? I often invite VCs to serve on a panel in 6.171 critiquing student presentations of their projects. Bob Metcalfe, inventor of Ethernet and now at Polaris, is only the most illustrious of the VCs who has served in this capacity. My personal experience with junior-level VCs who had never had profit-and-loss responsibility and yet attempted to operate my old business has not soured me on the entire class of folks.

  12. And if one of these ex-businessmen had been nominated, he would have been slimed, discredited, lied about, and demonized as thoroughly as Kerry was (or McCain in 2000). The devil, in this case, was not in the details of the candidate’s resumes.

  13. Why, Ah-nold Schwartznegger! He’s not really a Repub, adn he is a successful bizman.

  16. Nah – the real mistake was that the Democrats ran a war veteran against a war shirker. The last four elections have featured a vet against a shirker, and the shirkers are ahead four to zip.

  17. Everyone forgets the mother of all Democrats with solid Biz experience: Robert Rubin, former Treasury Secretary. Although wonder why he doesn’t make a good candidate? Jon Corzine is another experience. I’m disinclined to give too much credit to Wall Street people as it is not a people-business, and is very transactionally oriented, but it’s better than Kerry’s cred “I’ll lie less than Bush.”

  18. THANK YOU VERY MUCH!!! THAT’S EXACTLY WHAT I SAID THE F’ING SECOND THEY CHOSE EDWARDS!!! DEMOCRATS ARE FREAKING IDIOTS!!!

  19. I think that the current tone of politics today requires that somebody has to be groomed for the role from early adulthood (at the very least). That leaves a 30 year lag-time between the start of grooming and electability. I would be willing to believe that most of the currently ripe democratic prospects have already made fatefull decisions to base their careers on government/public service instead of corporate advancement.

    I do not believe that many successful businessmen, that had not spent the last 30 years preparing for public office, would be willing to deal with the public exposure that goes along with the job.

    Of course there are exceptions:
    Dick Cheney, life spent in government service, crowned with ceo-ship late in career.

    George W Bush (admittedly groomed for the job for 3 generations) – made acceptable for public consumption with last-minute (politically speaking) conversion to christianity.

    Why is it that our society is ever-so-impressed with the Trumps and oh-so neglectful of the (insert name of forgotten public servant)s of the world…

  20. Robert Rubin doesn’t make a good candidate because he will only appeal to Wall Street, not Main Street. Also he raped the Treasury to bail out his friends who had investments in Mexico by propping up the peso.

  21. Ok, I presume you are joking. Reasoning in the same way, the majority in Italy elected Berlusconi (the richer Italian, a successful business man). Now, Berlusconi has demonstrated that in fact people were right: he and his companies are becoming more and more wealthier! He is changing laws in order to avoid trials and to let his companies to grow faster. After all, he is spending his days in the same way he did before elections: doing business for himself.

  22. About Governor Warner — he’s done a better job than any politician I can remember, ever, in bringing Virginia through a very challenging fiscal crisis, and cleaning up the wreckage left by previous administrations. No doubt the man is competent.

  24. I have noticed that Phil censors a lot of the comments- especially ones that may not paint him in a nice light. You may think you are a decent guy Phil, but the rest of the world knows better, except those that you are fooling at the moment.

  25. Philip isn’t big enough that comments like “the rest of the world knows better” even apply. Maybe one out of 50,000 people have ever heard of him. Also, I think he is a decent guy. What exactly has he said that makes you think differently?

    But I believe he will censor you for calling him Phil. That really seems to set him off.

  26. I announced a moderation policy some months ago on this Weblog. Alternative perspectives on the same issue are welcome. A comment that talks about some other issue, that attacks a person, that says “the original posting sucks” or “the original posting is great”, are all not very interesting for other readers. So they get nuked! (That’s assuming I have time and energy to moderate, which I usually don’t.)

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