Voter trust is no guarantee for business platform candidates

In the wake of Nov. 2 elections, which featured candidates running on business platforms in prominent races nationwide, a Maryland professor cautioned against "generalizing" the relationship between business and electoral politics.

Dr. Peter Morici, an economist and professor in the Smith School of Business, dismissed the notion that a business background automatically qualifies as either a positive or negative asset in seeking office.

"In any race, your background is one issue," said Morici. But political party, national and local political and economic conditions and the personality of the candidate are other major factors.

"I don't think that you can easily generalize about being an executive, other than that if you were a successful executive, you can point to that," Morici said. "But then you have to win [voters'] hearts and minds."

Morici said he believes the media has made too much of the defeats of California's gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman and Senate candidate Carly Fiorina, both Republicans and former CEOs.

"Whitman hardly lost to an inexperienced or unseasoned candidate," Morici said, noting that the former eBay CEO's Democratic opponent, Governor-Elect Jerry Brown, was a former presidential candidate, a two-term governor and is also California's attorney general.

Fiorina, who was named 2009 in the now-defunct online business magazine Condé Nast Portfolio as being one of "The 20 Worst American CEOs of All Time" for her tenure at Hewlett–Packard from 1999 to 2005, had no positive business record on which to run, added Morici.

"At Hewlett–Packard, [Fiorina] wasn't successful," said Morici of the candidate's years as the company's CEO, during which the company's stock value declined by 60 percent and 30,000 of its employees were laid off. "I wasn't all that surprised that she lost to [Sen. Barbara] Boxer."

Daily Record Executive Editor and Philip Merrill College of Journalism adjunct professor Tom Linthicum said candidates who did not work to define themselves beyond their business record, successful or otherwise, were fighting uphill this year because of the lagging economy.

"There's a really bad taste in the mouth of the public in general right now because of the bank problems, because of the Wall Street problems, and now because of the foreclosure problems," said Linthicum.

Linthicum pointed to politicians like New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Senator-elect Rob Portman, R-Ohio, as examples of candidates who are able to self-fund their campaigns, or who receive a lot of donations from big businesses, who have nonetheless managed to avoid alienating working- and middle-class voters.

"I think you have to be really thoughtful about it, really intentional about it," Linthicum said. "I think you have much less margin for error if you're self-funded."

Even in the case of former business executives who were elected, like Michigan Governor-Elect Rick Snyder, former CEO of Gateway, and Florida Governor-Elect Rick Scott, former CEO of Columbia/HCA, Morici said he did not believe the candidates' records as business executives were necessarily the definitive reason they won.

To be a good politician or public servant "is a skill different from being a private business executive," Morici said.

"You're not there to make a profit [when you're a politician]," Morici added. "You're there to make a constituency happy with your actions."

Snyder and Scott, both Republicans, will have some company in the ranks of businessmen whom voters elected this year. In his first run for office, Senator-elect Ron Johnson, R-Wis., CEO of Oshkosh, Wis.-based manufacturing firm Pacur, unseated three-term Democratic Sen. Russ Feingold. Governor-Elect Paul LePage, R-Maine, is the general manager of Marden's Surplus and Salvage, a Maine retail chain.

Fiorina and Whitman were not the only candidates unable to make the jump from running a business to serving in political office. World Wrestling Entertainment CEO Linda McMahon, R-Conn., lost her run for an open Senate seat by a wide margin. Many House candidates, including Washington state Democrat Suzan DelBene, a former Microsoft vice president, and New Mexico Republican Jon Barela, founder of cloud computing firm Cerelink, also fell short in their bids for office.