Just like baseball teams and really any other sports franchise, politicians also are enterprises.  They may not be incorporated in quite the same way and maybe the legal terminology is different but look at the facts.  They have to build a brand around a name.  They want to figure out how to get you, the consumer, to spend your hard-earned cash on whatever it is they happen to be peddling.  They have no trouble floating with the winds of whatever fad has taken the country by storm at a certain point in time.  The sad fact of the matter is that Jimmy Stewart’s Mr. Smith never really existed except for in our collective imagination.

But this is where it gets fun.  Sure, it’s easy to compare different sports franchises with different companies, expounding on their similarities and noting the token differences.  But if politicians are corporations, too, how do they stack up against their private sector counterparts?

Well, luckily for you, RSBS is here to fill you in.  Since we don’t have enough time to go down the list and match up every politician with the business that he most resembles, we’re just going to use the four most important politicians of the moment, the presidential and vice-presidential candidates.  So, without further ado, RSBS presents:  Candidate, Inc.

Barack Obama

We begin with the sitting president and initiator of one of the most formidable marketing campaigns of recent memory, Barack Obama.  His meteoric rise from being born to a single mother to Chicago neighborhood organizer to President of the United States is the American Dream personified.  It hasn’t always been easy and six months ago it seemed that his run had finally come to an end.  But somehow he used his rivals’ mistakes and his own impressive skills to claw himself back from the edge of ruin.  Sound familiar?  It should because it’s pretty similar to the same path taken by one of the companies he saved, General Motors.

Joe Biden

Joe hasn’t always had an easy ride, even if it’s sometimes self-inflicted.  But the man just keeps coming back.  Severe stutter as a child?  Bounces back. Wife and daughter die in a car crash?  Bounces back.  Makes vaguely racist remarks about a fellow candidate?  Bounces back.  Sure, he may not have ended up being number one but vice-president ain’t too shabby neither.  And Joe has his moments.  Remember when he managed to drop an f-bomb on national television?  Or when he basically called the Republicans the reincarnation of Southern plantation owners?  You may not always love him and he may not have come out on top but the man has something.  Kind of like the Ford Motor Company.

Mitt Romney

Moving to the other side of the aisle, we have the scion of a wealthy and well-connected political family who just can’t seem to figure out what that all means.  Sure, he’s ambitious and it’s obvious that he’ll go to all sorts of lengths to win. But what does he really do?  What does he really stand for?  Does he attend NASCAR races to see fast cars driving in circles or to hang out with the team owners?  He’s kind of like Kodak.  Like Kodak, he had all the keys to success but then he couldn’t figure out how to reinvent himself when the paradigm shifted.  He was successful as governor mainly because he worked with the other party and even adopted some of their policies.  And you know what?  It worked!  But then his digital camera moment came along, the Tea Party, and despite having all the advantages, he just can’t seem to put it together.  The way things are going now, Romney appears set to follow in Kodak’s tracks.  I’m pretty sure losing the presidential election would hurt just about as bad as being dropped from the Dow Jones Industrial Average.

Paul Ryan

And finally we come to the baby of the group, the newcomer who in the past two years pretty much has come to define what “Republican” means today.  The “Paul Ryan Budget” plan, the championing of causes close to the hearts of the Tea Party faithful, his anointment as heir apparent and placement on the presidential ticket.  It’s an amazing valuation for a young and relatively unknown congressman.  In fact, it reminds me a lot of another brand that rode to national prominence based on similar parlor tricks.  However, when you ask how Enron‘s stock is faring today, the best you can hope for is a look of awkward questioning as the other person hopes you’re just joking.  It turns out that it was all just smoke and mirrors.  Paul Ryan?  Pretty much the same thing.

In today’s political landscape where corporate cash injections pretty much determine the course of events, it makes sense that the candidates themselves would have to begin acting like corporations in order to succeed.  But since that mindset has become the de facto organizing principle for everything from baseball teams to high schools, chances are we should probably just get used to it.  But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to figure out what kind of businesses we’re dealing with.

-A