So You Want To Go Into Politics?

A growing number of entrepreneurs are abandoning the privacy and freedom of business for the perils of public office.

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If the business of America is business, as Calvin Coolidge once said, then why is the country run mostly by lawyers?Even today, when the White House has proved hospitable to (of all things) an actor, 60% of the Senate and 43% of the House are made up of people who were trained in the law. Explanations vary, but most suggest that if anyone is to blame for this state of affairs it is businesspeople themselves. Edwin Zschau, for example, the Republican congressman from California's 12th District, reports that whenever he lectures businesspeople's groups on how badly government needs their fresh approach to the issues, he usually gets the same reply: "Ed, you're right, but we've got more important things to do." This only proves Zschau's point, which is that government then gets left to people "who haven't anything better to do," but his audiences are seldom moved.

In a somewhat similar vein, Senator J. James Exon, a Democrat from Nebraska, argues that "the main reason businesspeople don't run for office is they want to make money. Why go into polities and get knocked around when you can play golf on Wednesday and Saturday afternoons and make a hell of a lot more money doing it?" Former Republican Governor Richard A. Snelling of Vermont offers another reason: the lack of fit between the political and the business life. "Politicians are the least entrepreneurial group of people I've ever known," Snelling maintains. "They go where the road goes. Government totally lacks the ability to forge new paths, to take big risks."

All three of these men, however, defy their own explanations. Ed Zschau, the "representative from Silicon Valley," as he is known on the Hill, was the founder and chief executive officer of System Industries Inc., a manufacturer of computer memory systems, before he won a seat in Congress in 1982. By the same token, Exon built a successful office-equipment business before becoming Nebraska's governor in 1970 and a senator eight years later. Snelling parlayed some money he earned by rehabilitating a Vermont cable-TV system into a successful diversified-manufacturing company, one division of which made ski racks and ski poles -- not a bad business base for a would-be politico in the Green Mountain State. Elected governor in 1976, he was reelected three more times before stepping down last January.

There are other entrepreneurs in big-time politics. Among the governors there is Republican Robert D. Orr, a venture capitalist and small-business man who was recently reelected to a second term in Indiana. Among U.S. senators there is Howard M. Metzenbaum (D-Ohio), who built a lucrative chain of airport parking lots out of real estate investments in Cleveland; Frank R. Lautenberg (D-N.J.), a co-founder of Automatic Data Processing Inc., who was a pioneer in the computer services industry; or Rudy Boschwitz (R-Minn.), who forged a chain of home-improvement centers in the upper Midwest. And besides Zschau there are other members of the House, Berkley Bedell (D-Iowa), for example, who developed a successful fishing-tackle business (Bedell invented a new type of monofilament fishing line) with money he had been saving ever since he had had a paper route.

Still, proportionate to their numbers, businesspeople are clearly staying out of electoral politics in droves. One obvious reason, as Senator Exon asserts, is the financial sacrifice. Another, arguably more important, is the sacrifice of privacy. "You have to enjoy the celebrity part," says Congressman Fortney H. "Pete" Stark (D-Calif.). He certainly does. A founder of a successful bank in Walnut Creek, Calif., Stark managed to become something of a celebrity even when he was a banker -- a feat rarely achieved, or desired, by most members of that profession. At the height of the anti-Vietnam War protests, for example, he draped his bank in a huge peace sign. Such antics did him no harm in the name-recognition department when in 1972 he challenged a 28-year veteran of the House, George P. Miller, in the primary; neither did the wealth he had amassed hurt him in the subsequent general election. He has been in Congress, and still occasionally celebrated, ever since.

Still, almost all of the entrepreneurs in public life today agree that the loss of privacy was perhaps the biggest shock they had in moving from business to public life. "It is relentless," says Boschwitz. "You have to always ve up, always meeting people. You want to leave them with a good impression. In business you don't always care so much." In business, too, especially entrepreneurial private business, no one but the Internal Revenue Service sniffs around your financial affairs, and the IRS is pledged to discretion.

In politics, your business is everybody's business; there are times when the entire press corps, not to mention your opponents, will have their noses in your books. In Lewis E. Lehrman's 1982 New York gubernatorial campaign against Mario M. Cuomo, for example, Lehrman got involved in an abstruse but nasty front-page dispute with a former colleague over exactly how much credit Lehrman deserved for growing his family's wholesale grocery store business into Rite Aid Corp., the billion-dollar drugstore chain. In the 1974 Ohio primaries, John Glenn defeated Howard Metzenbaum at least in part by hammering away at Metzenbaum's difficulties with the IRS over $118,000 in back taxes. Metzenbaum was finally elected to the Senate in 1976, but he and Glenn are among the most distant of colleagues.

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