Whit Ayres’ comments in US News on chief executive officers making the transition to politics:
Whit Ayres, a veteran GOP consultant, lists three weaknesses business-only leaders suffer when they seek political office. They’re arrogant, Ayres says, thinking they know more about polling than pollsters and more about how the media operates than media experts do. They see themselves as the hirers, and not the person asking voters to hire them for an important job (and, as a consequence, they don’t handle scrutiny or criticism well). And they don’t think they need to learn new things, because they can always hire experts to deal with it, much as they might hire an accountant to do the books at the office.
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“The famous political scientist Richard Neustadt argued that presidential power is the power to persuade. It’s not the power to order things to be done. It’s the power to persuade people that what you want them to do is in their best interest,” says Ayres, who advised Florida Sen. Marco Rubio when he was running for president. “A lot of people who come from a hierarchical environment, military or business, find it hard to make the transition to be an effective political deal-maker, wherein the premium is on persuasive ability. Bullying people who have their own independent constituencies is not really an effective governing technique,” Ayres says.
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Could Trump make the transition from ultimate authority to someone who can navigate Congress, courts, independent agencies and the press? Experts are skeptical. Ayres, for his part, says he was approached by a CEO client who said he wanted to hire the seasoned consultant precisely because he didn’t want to make the same mistakes other businesspeople make when they run for office. “He proceeded to make every single one of them,” Ayres laments. And he lost the race.
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