Campaign ’96 / CAMPAIGN LETTER : Worlds Collide When Businessmen Want to Be America’s CEO : Corporate stars such as Forbes, Perot can’t succeed in politics if they reject the political culture. And voters respond by sensing that an outsider can’t deliver what an insider can.

This is the age of interchangeable fame. Actors, talk-show hosts, athletes, tycoons, super-agents, politicians, these are our all-purpose personalities. Their opinions are apt to be sought not just on one subject, but on many subjects. Their presence is requested at our head tables wherever we gather. Their faces adorn the same magazine covers.

But there is a deception here: Achievement is not so easily transferred from one calling to another.

In two consecutive presidential elections, business moguls have tried and failed to cash in on their fortunes and install themselves as CEO of America.

Washington needs hardheaded business leadership at the top. That was the pitch. And it made perfectly good sense to Steve Forbes and Ross Perot. And for a time it seemed to make sense to many Americans. Surely it was an interesting thought, and exciting.

But for reasons that go beyond the candidacies of these two men, the notion of CEO-as-president remains flawed. It does not account for the contradictory expectations America imposes on its presidents. It does not recognize how much we cherish the attributes of the politician, even if we do not always feel like saying so.

Give us an outsider to clean up the mess, voters say with delight.

Ah, the outsider: That’s one thing. But time and again, Americans also ask more of their would-be presidents--and nothing so much as the skills displayed by the true insider.

“Americans want a miracle worker, someone, as the saying goes, to make the grass grow,” said historian Robert Dallek, author of the forthcoming book “Hail to the Chief--The Making and Unmaking of American Presidents.”

“But we suffer from schizophrenia too in this country,” said Dallek. “We’re a middle-class, middle-ground, consensual society. We are put off by strong centralized authority. It runs counter to our individualism.”

Dallek recalled the tumultuous year of 1968 to emphasize his point. The Vietnam War and racial friction had brought America to a boil. A tour company in Europe was advertising a package deal, “See America while it lasts.”

“Yet who did we pick as our candidates for president that year? Richard Nixon and Hubert Humphrey, two of the most familiar names in politics. We went back to the middle ground. And the same this year. Look at the nominees, Bob Dole and Bill Clinton, two career politicians,” Dallek said.

Ronald Reagan remains the contemporary archetype of someone who not only understood the insider-outsider paradox of American politics, but used its weight, judo-like, to throw his adversaries.

Even after 16 years in executive office, first as governor of California then as president, Reagan never gave an inch in his claim of being a political outsider. Yet he yielded willingly to the deal-making necessary to satisfy a system of intricate checks and balances.

Few in history have done it so deftly.

The wheelers and dealers seem incapable of expressing a coherent ideology as Reagan did; and the CEO outsiders consistently reject the give-and-take at which he was so accomplished.

“The corporate world is a dictatorship. Politics and business, they’re different managerial worlds,” said Joe Carrabino, professor of management at UCLA’s Graduate School of Management and himself a former candidate for California superintendent of public instruction.

Take a matter like listening.

Campaigns, long and costly and often maddening, offer the chance for Americans to be heard.

“But CEOs come from a culture where they are not expected to listen. They are expected to know the answer. And when they spoke, it is an order.” Carrabino said.

Hence bumper stickers, “Ross For Boss.”

Surely Americans admire the successful boss. But just as surely, they resent being bossed. During presidential campaigns, millions of messages--hopes, fears, concerns, dreams--filter from the public to the candidates, from state officials, contributors, members of Congress, the news media, pollsters and the apparatus of the political parties.

Successful politicians synthesize these into recognizable consensus, and, if we’re lucky, inspire us with their own dreams of what else is possible. It is little wonder, then, why the middle is such familiar ground.

America’s two most recent CEO presidential candidates disregarded this vast and complicated ritual. They argued this was the root of what was wrong in America. And therein may have been their biggest mistake, say experts who watched Forbes and Perot closely.

While neglecting the traditional voter-to-candidate dialogue of consensual democracy, the two CEOs had no reservations whatsoever at embracing the new marketing tactics of political consultants.

Thinking he knew how to be boss, but not how to get elected, Perot employed a whole bevy of hired guns. Forbes followed the now-standard practice of running “negative” advertisements against his opponents. They threw money into television. Between them, perhaps $90 million, which for Forbes was about $27 per vote and for Perot just over $3.

Suddenly, the public began to view these CEOs with suspicion. They acted like politicians but they did not listen like politicians. In short, they became the worst of what they decried.

At the beginning, of course, the appeal of CEO-as-president was more than just curiosity. Money and position are measures of contemporary success. Men with both, and the willingness to put their own cash on the line, found favor with cynical voters.

But in the complexity of national politics, the shortcomings of the business executive were quickly sighted. The CEO, by definition, is absorbed with finance. They laid claim to being quick studies on the broader range of issues, but not always convincingly. Economics and “leadership” may be primary concerns but most voters also have a supplemental and often specific array of other interests on which they expect to be heard.

Leaving aside debate over the soundness of their arguments, neither Forbes nor Perot had really acquainted themselves with American voters, believing they could somehow preserve their privacy in this most public of endeavors.

“They went flat for one simple reason: They lacked public familiarity which made them extremely vulnerable to negative attacks by the press or their opponents,” said consultant Sal Russo, who was a political director in Perot’s campaign and who conducted nationwide focus groups on behalf of Forbes.

But at a more fundamental level, Frank Luntz, a GOP pollster who worked for Perot, said both 1990s CEO candidates were never able to bridge the worlds of commerce and government. Historians have made the same case against another 20th century businessman who campaigned against entrenched politicians for lower taxes, less government, more international trade: utility company executive Wendell Willkie, who was the GOP presidential candidate in 1940 against Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Luntz cited several incompatibilities between the CEO and the politician: “CEOs are results-oriented. Politicians are process-oriented. In politics, words matter. In business, words don’t matter--it’s only what you sign that matters. Business is done in private. Politics is done in public. Businessmen keep their agreements. In politics, agreements are good only until the next crisis.”

In a curious echo of today, political scientist Mary Earhart Dillon made this observation in her 1952 biography of Willkie:

“One of the amazing mysteries regarding Wendell Willkie was his lack of a sense of reality in American politics. His platonic idealism and his repugnance to political trading impelled him to disregard or belittle the place of political parties in American government. His hatred of dishonest bosses and shifty candidates warped his understanding of political leadership in modern democracy.”