Mohacsy's Safe Portfolio Member Forum

[Elroy Jetson]

Debt ceiling talks falling apart is hardly unexpected.

A person with a lot of business experience is a good person to have running a business . . .

. . . but I've come to realize the best person to run a government is someone like Nancy Pelosi who knows all the arcane details of how our government works.


A "business guy" can get elected and rely heavily on experienced political staffers for advice, but that's not different from putting a politician in charge of a Fortune 500 company saying he can rely on experienced business staffers.

Like it or not they're not interchangeable skills.

My skill set obtaining governmental approvals for Chevron's projects from agencies and public meetings were a lot closer to being a politician than a business person. I had to know I had the votes. You have to understand people to do that. Being able to take in a huge amount of information and make sense of it as a whole is helpful too.

There were a lot of real estate and royalty attorneys in Chevron's Land Department who were absolutely incapable of doing what I did, as they so often proved again and again. But if you wanted to review a mineral rights contract or set up a property exchange, they were the people to go to - I'm sure I would have missed many potential liabilities. Different skill set.