John McCain: The "Apple" of American Politics
If John McCain's campaign were compared to a well-known product, what would it be? Perhaps the computer company Apple?
As NPR's David Kestenbaum reported on All Things Considered, business professors see a lot of similarities in the two. Both went through boom, bust, then boom cycles. And both try to be insiders and outsiders at the same time.
Like McCain, Apple fell on hard times, says David Brady, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and a professor of political science at Stanford University. The Mac computer lost sales to the PC but came back. McCain embodies a similar maverick appeal, he says."It's never kind of mainstream, in the sense that it doesn't sell as many computers as Dell or HP, but they've got a nice loyal following," he says of both the computer and the campaign.
But a business trying to copy the McCain experienced would have a hard time. The former chief adviser to John Edwards' campaign, Joe Trippi, says the schizophrenic nature of McCain's campaign makes it hard to pinpoint the type of CEO its leader would be in the business world.
On one hand, Trippi says, McCain made the "tough decisions" in his campaign by overhauling his staff when the campaign nearly went bankrupt. But it also took a while for McCain to make those decisions, he says. "It's like you've got a great CEO and a really scary one in the same guy."
9:48 AM ET | 04-11-2008 | permalink
