Apr

9

Well, I’d rather vote on issues, but …

April 9, 2008 |

About a month ago, Scott Hepburn wrote this:

If you’re a business owner searching desperately for policy differences between Obama and Clinton to guide your choice, good luck…they’re not very different. The decision may come down to which candidate will run the country the way you run your business.

Indeed.

Which brings us to the question of how the various candidates would run the country. Since none of them has done it before, it would seem that we have little useful information upon which to base a decision.

Think again.

As Peter Beinart pointed out in yesterday’s Washington Post, one reliable predictor of how a candidate will run the country is how they ran their campaign.

So, if we accept Peter’s premise and assess how each of the candidates has run their campaign and apply Scott’s speculation that maybe small business owners should favor the candidate who would run the country the way they run their business, you may still be left in a quandry when it comes time to step into the voting booth.

By then, of course (unless you live in one of the states that has not yet held its Democratic primary), choosing between Hillary and Obama won’t be an issue. But, accepting the field as it is right now, which of them runs their campaign in a way that most closely resembles the way you run your business?

If your desk is a muddle of paperwork and you find yourself scratching your head and wondering where your money went every month when you do your books, you may most closely identify with the McCain campaign.

If your desk is a muddle of paperwork but you don’t care because you know that organizational ability has no impact on your greatness anyway, you might feel a certain kinship with the Clinton campaign.

If, on the third hand, you are reasonably well organized, single-mindedly accomplished, and use Firefox for your web surfing, the Obama campaign may be calling out to you.

Depending on how you feel about how good you are at running your business (as opposed to making/doing whatever it is you make/do to make money), you may decidedly not want somebody in the Oval Office behaving the way you do in your home office.

That said, this method of choosing your candidate might not seem much better to you than throwing dice or casting runes but, given the absence of actual economic policy that is specific to small and microbusinesses, this seems to be the best we can do.

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Comments

1 Comment so far

  1. Scott Hepburn on April 9, 2008 12:56 pm

    Great follow up post, Dawn. As the Democratic nomination process drags and McCain treads a strategically fine line, I think we’ll learn a little more about the candidates. At least I hope we will.

    Did you hear NPR’s comparison of the Obama campaign to a finely run franchise? It wasn’t about substance so much, but it was an insightful perspective nonetheless. You might want to share the link with your readers:

    http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=89438634&ft=1&f=2

    Thanks for the quote…I look forward to some great conversation about this!

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