CFOs opt to stay the course with President Bush.

• Author: Cunningham, Colleen
• Position: President's Page - Chief Financial Officer

On a quarterly basis, FEI and Baruch College's Zicklin School of Business conduct the well-respected CFO Outlook Survey. The survey participants are U.S. chief financial officers across a wide spectrum of companies--small caps, mid-caps and large caps, publicly traded and privately held, crossing all major industry sectors, revenue strata and geographical locations.

This survey tends to get a lot of press attention--there are some questions that we have carried over for years--providing the ability to perform long-term trend analysis. However, for each survey we do try to add several questions that are of immediate relevance to our CFOs.

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This past June's survey was no different, targeting 355 CFOs across the U.S. whose only commonality was their title. But, overwhelmingly, they agreed on one thing: They want President George W. Bush to continue running the country for another four years.

The respondents ranked both President Bush and Sen. John Kerry across four key factors: the U.S. economy, homeland security, foreign policy and oil prices. In all four measures, corporate chief financial officers chose Bush over Kerry as the better leader.

In the area of homeland security--long understood to be Bush's strong suit--three-quarters of the CFOs responding to the survey rated him superior to Kerry. Less than 9 percent favored Kerry, and 16 percent saw no difference between the two men.

Although homeland security was Bush's highest-ranking area in the survey, he also strongly outscored Kerry on the U.S. economy, capturing more than two-thirds (69 percent) of the vote. Kerry took less than 15 percent, with 16 percent of respondents finding no difference.

Kerry's highest ranking was in the area of foreign policy, with one-third of respondents thinking he would be better than Bush. However, Bush won the day with 57 percent of CFOs preferring him. Fewer than 10 percent saw no difference on this issue.

Lastly, on oil prices, nearly half (48.6 percent) of corporate chief financial officers preferred Bush to Kerry, who had 13 percent of the vote. In this category, 38 percent of respondents felt there would be no appreciable difference between the two candidates on this topic.

What do these results tell us? Even given...