Carly Was Right

The old adage in Washington is that a gaffe is when someone tells the truth and it's inconvenient. Carly Fiorina did that this week.

The former chairman and C.E.O. of Hewlett Packard, now known as H.P., who is a major supporter and spokesperson for the Republican party and the McCain campaign, let loose that the 72-year-old Arizona Senator is not qualified to run a major corporation. She went on to note that neither is Joe Biden, Barack Obama, or Sarah Palin. They're different skills, she noted. The full video of her remarks can be seen here. Press reports say that senior McCain aides were furious, and that Fiorina won't be seen on the trail for awhile.

But Fiorina was right, and I suspect most business executives like her would agree.

The skills needed to run a corporation aren't easily transferred to politics, or vice versa. I know that Fiorina's comments bear the weight of her having been kicked out of H.P. after the stock fell more than 50 percent on her watch. The fact is that the Compaq merger, which critics said would kill the company, didn't, and it probably set the stage for more acquisitions like current C.E.O. Mark Hurd picking up E.D.S. this year and doing a great job for shareholders. She may have been at odds with the H.P. culture, but clearly the board she dealt with was dysfunctional as evidenced by the Get Smart-like spy scandal that followed her.

Separate Fiorina from her words and you've got to concede that she's got a point. Let's look at the track record of politicians at corporations. Dick Cheney was a lousy head of Haliburton, leading it to acquire Dresser Industries and enough asbestos litigation to last a life time. Pols may make good lawyer-lobbyists, but it's hard to think of one that's gone on to run a corporation well. About the closest one I can think of is Dwight Eisenhower who ran Columbia University after World War II but before he became president.

Now look at it the other way: business leaders who became president. In the 20th century the four presidents with the most private sector business experience are Herbert Hoover, Warren Harding, Jimmy Carter and George W. Bush. (Detect a pattern here?) Yes, Harry Truman was a haberdasher, but not for that long before he became a machine politician and a senator. Ronald Reagan managed his own stage-and-speaking career, but didn't really run a business. Most were like John F. Kennedy, Franklin Roosevelt, Richard Nixon, Lyndon Johnson, and Teddy Roosevelt—careerists taking one government position after another.

Hoover and Harding were the most successful businessmen of the four that I mentioned. Hoover was a mining executive, considered the best in the business, and Harding was an Ohio newspaper publisher. Harding proved to be a corrupt disaster. Hoover was just a disaster, although his relief efforts in World War I had made him a national hero.

None of this is to suggest that a businessman would, by definition, be a bad president. It just means that there's no correlation between success in one endeavor and success in another.

And it's not just the presidency. If you think of the U.S. Senate, the big named businessmen--Frank Lautenberg, the New Jersey Senator and former head of A.D.P/, and Herb Kohl, of the eponymous department store, are among the big moguls. No one would call them giants of the Senate.

So let Carly out of the box. She only spoke the truth.

Matt Cooper

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