By: Robert J. Terry

It seems that every election cycle a high-profile former business executive announces plans to run for public office. Government needs to be run like a business, they say, with greater accountability and more sophisticated performance-based measurement.

Sometimes that message resonates. It’s worked wonders for Michael Bloomberg in New York City. I covered former Virginia Gov. Mark Warner a little bit in the early aughts, and the former venture capitalist from Northern Virginia proved fairly effective at winning over red portions of the Old Dominion with his message of bipartisanship and making state government more modern and efficient. The Democrat was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2008.

This week, however, three business executives with big names got beat like a drum at the polls — and spent a lot of their own money for the pleasure.

Ex-Silicon Valley CEOs Meg Whitman (eBay) and Carly Fiorina (Hewlett-Packard) lost their bids for California governor and U.S. Senator, respectively. And in Connecticut, Linda McMahon, the former CEO of World Wrestling Entertainment, was defeated for a U.S. Senate seat by the Nutmeg State’s attorney general.

Given the economic devastation of the last two years — and the view of many people of the central role Big Business has played in said devastation — it seems prudent politically to perhaps downplay one’s private sector resume. As this post at Good Morning Silicon Valley points out, Whitman’s and Fiorina’s time in the corner office was pretty skillfully used against them by opponents Jerry Brown and Barbara Boxer.

Whitman was portrayed as a, shall we say, mercurial boss who also jettisoned her longtime former maid upon finding out she was an illegal immigrant. Boxer, meanwhile, hammered away at Fiorina’s track record running H-P: Laying off 30,000 people, outsourcing jobs, eventually being forced out by the board.

Those are tough decisions that CEOs sometimes have to make, to maximize shareholder value, right the corporate ship, etc. But they also carry huge consequences when running for public office. Particularly during a time of economic devastation.

Michael Hiltzik of the Los Angeles Times wondered why CEOs make such terrible politicians. He quotes Simon Ramo, a prominent California industrialist, as saying that many qualities that make a good CEO are necessary, but not sufficient, to make a good politician, “in the same sense that a concert violinist and a neurosurgeon need supple fingers — ‘but that doesn’t mean you’d want a violinist to perform your surgery,’ ” Ramo tells him.

Maybe it’s a California thing. Ron Johnson, a Wisconsin plastics manufacturer, knocked off incumbent Russ Feingold for a U.S. Senate seat. He spent $8 million of his own money on the race, chump change when compared with the $200 million Whitman reportedly spent on her race. McMahon spent $45 million.

Deep pockets are nice in politics, but something tells me the landscape of CEOs with political bona fides in Maryland would still be pretty barren. Besides, there’s that $1.7 billion structural deficit to contend with. Would Nolan Archibald, Bill Marriott or Kevin Plank really aspire to that? Would Mayo Shattuck?

They’d probably prefer the challenges of economic devastation to consensus building and other hallmarks of the business of democracy. That said, feel free to tell us a Maryland-based executive, past or present, who’d make a good politician, and why.