Mr. Businessman Goes to Washington

Perhaps not since the 1920s, when the U.S. economy was booming and the country giddy, have businessmen rushed the political gates the way they are this election year. In 1924, Democrats, of all people, nominated John W. Davis, a conservative Wall Street lawyer, for the presidency. Republicans chose Charles G. Dawes, a banker and financial advisor, to serve as Calvin Coolidge’s vice president. Faith in business was so strong that, the next year, Bruce Barton’s best-seller “The Man Nobody Knows” was extolling Jesus as the world’s best businessman, able to turn 12 employees into an efficient organization. The Depression soon dampened pro-business sentiments, and it wasn’t until 1940, when utilities lawyer Wendell Willkie was the GOP nominee, that businessmen resurfaced as political contenders. Even then their rehabilitation was short-lived.

But this year, the businessman is back. Candidates with business, but no electoral, experience are running in one-quarter of the 36 state gubernatorial races, among them Bill Simon Jr. in California and Winter Olympics organizer Mitt Romney in Massachusetts. Six sitting governors fit the same description, as do four U.S. senators. Even that venerable liberal enclave, New York City, has elected a multimillionaire businessman as its mayor, Michael R. Bloomberg. That surely proves the hostility is over.

Still, in the wake of the Enron and other business scandals and the demise of the dot-coms, and with the new focus on international terrorism requiring some mastery of foreign policy, it seems a bit strange that politically inexperienced businessmen should be vying for and occupying pubic office. From the parties’ point of view, there are certainly good reasons to recruit businessmen: They can finance their own campaigns. Almost as important is that the “celebritization” of wealth in America has turned businessmen from objects of vilification into icons of glamour. How else can one explain billionaire Donald Trump’s presidential flirtation in 2000?

But the rise of the businessman-politician has also been the direct consequence of another permanent feature of our culture that runs much deeper than electoral logistics. Businessmen are among the chief beneficiaries of a continuing war against government.

Americans have never much liked government. The Jeffersonian tradition, our dominant political tradition, is largely built on suspicion of government authority. Thomas Jefferson has been invoked both by liberals who fear infringement of their civil rights and by conservatives who fear infringement of their property rights. It is only when you need government, as in times of crisis, that the antagonism subsides. Otherwise, Americans seem to believe that the government which governs best is that which governs least.

It follows that if Americans distrust government, they also distrust professional politicians who want to run it. In the early days of the republic, politicians were drawn from the ranks of aristocrats who were thought to be concerned only with the public weal. As the 19th century wore on, the country developed a professional political class that functioned basically as a service organization providing for the needs of constituents in return for votes. But these professional pols were always under siege from good-government types, and the pols were always at pains to demonstrate that professionalism in politics was like professionalism in anything else--a virtue, not a fault.

Over the past 25 years or so of general prosperity and middle-class complacency, however, anti-government sentiment has become so powerful that it has overtaken government itself, especially after the election of Ronald Reagan to the presidency in 1980. As Reagan presented himself, he was a political mole, undermining the bureaucracy from within by pushing for huge tax cuts that made it much more difficult to fund government programs. Except for defense, he essentially promised to dismantle government, and many Americans seemed happy to acquiesce, subscribing to the words of Coolidge that “if the federal government should go out of existence, the common run of people would not detect the difference in the affairs of their daily life for a considerable length of time.”

In selling this idea to the American people, Reagan was not only playing upon the public’s natural antipathy toward government but upon two myths that continue to frame the debate over government because they seem self-evident. The first is that government is hopelessly inefficient, bloated and wasteful and that politicians are only too happy to spend Americans’ hard-earned tax dollars. The second is that government, which was designed to serve the public interest, has, over the years, developed interests of its own, and they diverge from the larger national interest. As far as politicians are concerned, what this means is that they are seen as having a far greater investment in their own perpetuation than in the good of the nation.Since the rise of Reaganism, both these ideas have become part of conventional wisdom, and that has boosted the prospects of businessmen-politicians. Government is profligate; business, subject as it theoretically is to the pure forces of the market, is efficient, sleek and productive. That is why, adherents say, businessmen make good leaders of government. They understand how to manage, how to focus on the bottom line, how to get results. “I’ve run a company,” businessmen candidates proudly declare in what has become a political mantra. It is an enormously appealing, if somewhat fatuous idea: You just run government the way you would run any company.

Businessmen also seem to be the antidote to the idea that politicians have only their self-interest at heart. Supporters will tell you that businessmen haven’t been indoctrinated by the political culture. They don’t need to feed at the public trough. They don’t see their interests as identical to the government’s. If anything, having fought federal regulation, businessmen have often been adversaries of the government. This reputedly makes them purer of heart and truer of purpose than the run-of-the-mill politician. They are America’s great noblemen.

Alas, if you subject these myths to even the slightest scrutiny, you realize that neither of them is true. Government can be tremendously efficient--witness Medicare--and business, as we have seen recently, can be deceptive, dishonest, profligate and incompetent, even when you consider that the biggest company in the U.S. is minuscule next to the government. Similarly, professional politicians can be public-spirited, even sacrificial, while businessmen can be selfish and self-serving. When government interests diverge from the public interest, it is usually because government is serving the interests of business, as in the Bush administration’s recent decision to impose tariffs on steel imports, even though that is likely to push up the price of steel products to consumers. In fact, the real difference between the two major parties has never been between one that wants more government and one that wants less but, rather, between one that believes government should protect the people from business and one that believes government should protect business from the people.

But true or not, these myths draw on a deep well of dissatisfaction not only with government but also with the democratic political process itself, and that dissatisfaction may be the ultimate appeal of the businessman as politician. Businessmen-politicians purport to be above politics. They represent themselves as not having to contend with the messy balancing of wants and needs, the negotiations among constituents, that is the essence of politics in a democracy but which has always seemed unwieldy and tainted. Businessmen don’t have to compromise. They command. That was businessman H. Ross Perot’s shtick when he was harassing the major parties. No political dickering for him. He was just going to go in there and get things done by fiat. It is one of the most alluring of political fantasies: that just as President Reagan could use government to destroy government, the businessman can promise to use politics to destroy politics.

That is why, even at a time when business itself is being discredited by one case of malfeasance after another, the businessman still has political credibility. As much as Americans hate the idea of business corruption, they hate the idea of government more, and they hate the idea of politics even more than government. Americans yearn for a selfless hero who doesn’t need politics at all, someone who arrives, makes decisions without compromise and instantly achieves results. That is what the businessman entering the political sphere seems to offer. He tells us that what politics cannot produce, business can. It is a message many Americans want desperately to believe.