Keith Crain of Crain’s Business Detroit writes:

A couple of weeks ago, I had a visitor to my office who’s running for governor of Michigan. He’s running as a Republican.

I was quite taken by his personality and his resumé. It would seem that he’s spent his entire lifetime training for this, what he would like to be his first political office.

Rick Snyder is his name and he has a business plan for Michigan.

It’s fun to talk to a businessman about politics. My sense is that a business executive could run a state a lot better than any politician could run a business of the same size.

It would be scary to envision state and federal politicians running a multibillion-dollar business. In fact, not many would qualify for the job.

But Rick Snyder convinced me that he would be very comfortable running a business that we call the State of Michigan.

So far, he’s the only businessman that I am aware of who is running for Michigan governor. Last time, in fact, Dick DeVos ran against our current governor. The voters picked the politician. We’ll let history decide on the wisdom of their decision.

But this time around, it makes a lot of sense to hire a businessman to run what is definitely a turnaround situation.

Snyder seems to have all the right experience to be an effective CEO of our state.

Some folks might argue that business executives aren’t compassionate enough to manage a government entity that requires skills that businesses don’t require.

I think that’s ridiculous. One of our great problems in government is that we haven’t attracted enough executives with business skills to run it like a business.

Michigan and Detroit were lucky enough to persuade Dave Bing to run for mayor of Detroit. He looks at the city through the eyes of an executive with decades of business experience. It’s the right skill set for Detroit.

Rick Snyder might just be what this state needs right now. With looming deficits and executive and legislative branches that seem stunned and helpless to do anything other than apply Band-Aids, he could be the breath of fresh air we need.

It’s a long way to both parties’ primaries. We’ll have lots of time to learn more about all of our Republican and Democratic candidates.

Take a look at Snyder; he’s an interesting guy.