Rick Scott, the recently-elected, Tea Party affiliated, former corporate CEO Governor of Florida, who by resume and ideology would seem to be virtually a dream candidate for conservative and Tea Party Republicans nationwide, has a problem: his fellow Republicans in the Florida state legislature can’t stand him.
For me, the most telling part of this article lies in the following quote … from a REPUBLICAN state legislator. ‘The governor doesn’t understand there is a State Constitution and that we have three branches of government,’ said State Senator Mike Fasano, a Republican from New Port Richey who upset Mr. Scott with rough handling of his staff during a testy committee hearing. ‘They are talking about the attitude that he is still the C.E.O. of his former health care corporation, and that is not going to work in this state, in Tallahassee, in my district. The people believe in three branches of government.’”
This may be the most cogent single statement I’ve ever seen summarizing why CEOs often struggle when they come to politics: they’re not in charge any more. Legislatures, whether at the state or national levels, are coequal branches of government. One simply cannot order the legislature to do something. And while you can dodge legislatures for a while, eventually you need them. And then the chickens usually come home to roost.
There is at least one other reason CEOs often struggle in politics. This relates to my post earlier today: politics is about competing conceptions of the good. Two perfectly reasonable people can want government to do different things because they have differing ideas about what government ought properly to do. They’re not evil—or not necessarily evil—they’re just different. Effective politicians have to learn how to elide differences and build from common ground on contentious issues. It’s part of their skill set.
By contrast, businesses have a fairly common conception of the good: profit. Businesses reach this shared end by different means, and of course there are sometimes titanic struggles within businesses about how to achieve profit, but the goal is the same: to make money for themselves and their shareholders.
Scott clearly takes the CEO approach to his job as Governor—and a particularly hard-charging CEO at that. (It was such hard-charging, it should be noted, that helped him build his hospital conglomerate, Columbia/HCA, into the nation’s largest hospital chain—and that got Columbia/HCA fined $1.7 billion in civil and criminal penalties for Medicare fraud.) It may work in the short term, and indeed it may work in the long-term, but right now it doesn’t look too good for Mr. Scott.
It takes talent to alienate co-ideologues by being more extreme than they are. Rick Scott has managed the trick in two months.
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