Rich Lowry‘s latest National Review Online column muses that Mitt Romney and Herman Cain could save themselves a lot of time, trouble, and expense if they really prefer lives as businessmen to lives as politicians. Lowry reminds readers that both the former Massachusetts governor and former Godfather’s Pizza CEO could have been career politicians if they had won earlier elections.
Distaste with the political establishment shouldn’t become distaste for the act of officeholding. Consider the figures the Tea Party admires most. The tea-party standard-bearer Jim DeMint is a former three-term congressman and is now in his second term as a senator from South Carolina. The rising star Marco Rubio spent about ten years in the Florida legislature and served as speaker of the Florida house before winning election to the U.S. Senate in 2010. If business experience were all important, the successful former Goldman Sachs executive Jon Corzine would have been a blessing to New Jersey as governor, and his politico successor — former freeholder, candidate for the legislature, and U.S. attorney Chris Christie — a flat failure.
Amid the slings of outrageous fortune, the politician learns how to inspire and persuade, how to avoid unnecessary minefields and pick his fights, when to accommodate his opponents and when to confront them, how to build a coalition and keep it together. A businessman might have similar challenges, but they aren’t played out in the public arena in the context of a balky, democratic political system that rarely moves on the basis of one man’s orders.
And the businessman’s work doesn’t depend on a philosophical commitment to a set of ideas. The best politicians, like the non-businessman Ronald Reagan, translate their principles into reality in a way that rises to statesmanship. It’s not important not to be a politician; it’s important to be a really good one.
