It looks easy when you are on the outside looking in.

The successful billionaire businessman, investor, entrepreneur and all-around philanthropist, looks at the people running the state or the city, shakes his head and says, “I can do it better.”

“I did it in business and I can do it in government,” he thinks even though he has never held or run for public office before.

He does not realize that he must understand politics first to get elected. Politics is not business, but a profession unto itself.

Since nobody knows who he is, the outsider starts from behind.

He has no base, has no political organization, doesn’t know how to campaign, or how to raise and spend campaign money to win an election.

So, he hires a bunch of highly paid political consultants to tell him what he does not know. They take him to the cleaners.

He also does not know that the advice they give him he can get for free by just talking to any seasoned politician or to the voters.

But he doesn’t know anybody in the business, which is why he hires consultants. He is an outsider in their hands.

He takes the information and advice his political consultants give him because he is paying for it, even if the advice is bad. The goal of the consultants is to keep the candidate in the fight as long as possible.

Since he doesn’t know man political people, he is hampered in raising campaign funds. But that is no problem because he is rich and can fiancé his political campaign himself.

He comes up with ten or $20 million of his own money to finance his campaign, and the political consultants are dancing in the street. Game on.

If he loses, the consultants say they did their best, but the guy had no business running. They did what they could, but it was a lost cause. On to the next political novice with money bags.

If I were Josh Kraft, the political novice and younger son of billionaire New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft—who wants to run for Boston mayor against incumbent Mayor Michelle Wu– I would study an earlier campaign of a rich outsider that went nowhere.

The campaigns are eerily similar.

This was the 2009 campaign for the U.S. Senate by billionaire Boston Celtics co-owner Stephen Pagliuca. He was 54 years old at the time. Kraft is 57.

Pagliuca, who like Kraft had not run for public office before, entered the 2009 special election in September to succeed Sen. Ted Kennedy who had died in August of that year.

Like Kraft today, few voters outside of Celtic fans knew who he was or what he looked like. Ditto Kraft.

After spending some $20 million of his own money, much of which went to political consultants, Pagliuca finished a distant fourth, losing to professional politicians Attorney General Martha Coakley and Rep. Michael Capuano.

Coakley won the primary with 311,548 votes to 185,157 for Capuano. Then there was 89,294 for activist Alan Khazi and 80,217 for Pagliuca.

Besides being a managing director at Bain Capital, Pagliuca, like Kraft was a philanthropist. Kraft, who recently moved from Chestnut Hill to a $2 million North End condo, oversees the Kraft family’s New England Patriots Foundation.

Like Kraft today, Pagliuca was a political consultant’s dream in that he financed his own campaign. Kraft also has deep pockets.

But it will take more than money and political consultants to defeat Wu, who is seeking her second four-year term.

Granted Wu has recently had a rough patch to overcome dealing with her failed property tax proposal, dissent over bike lanes, the rebuilding of White Stadium, and immigration, to name only a few bumps in the road.

First elected as an at-large candidate to the city council, she served on that body for four terms, including as president. She was the first Asian American to serve on the council and then get elected mayor, winning 64% of the vote in 2021.

Despite her youthful looks, she is forty, Wu is no novice. She may appear to be vulnerable, but she is a political pro who not only knows more than her political consultants, but she also knows the city, how to campaign and how to win.

So good luck to Kraft.

Peter Lucas is a veteran political reporter. Email him at: peter.lucas@bostonherald.com

Steve Pagliuca (Christopher Evans/Boston Herald, File)
Mayor Michelle Wu (Nancy Lane/Boston Herald, File)