CEOs Need Not Apply

Politico has a piece on the absence of people in the Obama cabinet with real world high-end business experience:

In President Barack Obama’s Cabinet, there is a Nobel Prize winner, a former mayor, and a veteran CIA agent. Surrounding him in the White House West Wing are a former four-star general, one of the nation’s most eminent economists, and a handful of this generation’s most talented political operatives.

This constellation of talent, however, has something of a black hole. There is virtually no one on Obama’s team with outsized achievements or a high-profile reputation earned in the world of business.

There are no former CEOs in the Obama Cabinet. And among the people who make up his daily inner circle, there is only a dollop or two of top-level private sector experience.

This is a notable absence, particularly for an administration whose domestic reputation will hinge on whether it can reverse one of the steepest economic downturns in decades. Most recent administrations—Democratic as well as Republican—have included several people who were bold-faced names in the corporate world before assuming influential jobs in Washington.

Whether it is a significant absence, however, is far more debatable. As it happens, only a small number of the business leaders in recent administrations were stand-outs. And several were ostentatious flops. It would be hard to argue that there is a close correlation between success in business and success in Washington.

Still, some long-time White House observers find it noteworthy that when Obama convenes his best minds there will be few people who have answered to shareholders as well as voters—people who know by intuition how the business community is likely to react to any given day’s news.

“It tells us a lot about Barack Obama, that these executives are just not part of his most inner circle,” said Stephen Hess, a senior fellow emeritus at the Brookings Institution. “There’s always been a place in government for these people who come from the business world, whether at Commerce, Defense, Treasury, or on the White House staff. But suddenly they’re not there.”

We know from Obama and the Dem's campaign rhetoric that CEOs are evil money-grubbing ogres who just want to financially rape their customers and the American people in general. The fly around in their carbon-spewing private jets, noshing on caviar and champagne, and laughing at the little people 5 miles below.

Why would Obama want any of these demons in his White House?

Of course, there's also the possibility that various CEOs were approached for key Obama positions but turned them down. Maybe they believed what Obama and the Dems said during the campaign.

The lack of real business experience will hurt this administration because they are operating with only theoretical knowledge of how the markets might react to their policies and not real world experience. Given that their knowledge is often based on lefty tropes and long disgraced theories, their ideas could be dangerously naive.