“First of all, I know both those guys”
Posted by Thomas Nephew on February 11th, 2010
Arianna Huffington, reporting from the Nashville “Tea Party” Convention, noticed a startling element of Sarah Palin’s speech:
Indeed, at times in her speech, Palin sounded like the second coming of Huey Long. “While people on Main Street look for jobs, people on Wall Street — they’re collecting billions and billions in your bailout bonuses,” she said. “And everyday Americans are wondering: Where are the consequences? They helped to get us into this worst economic situation since the Great Depression. Where are the consequences?”
Obama, meanwhile, is Mr. Nuance on the latest set of bonuses paid out to the Masters of The Universe. From an interview yesterday on Bloomberg.com, via Zack Carter of Alternet:
Q: Let’s talk bonuses for a minute: [Goldman Sachs CEO] Lloyd Blankfein, $9 million; [JP Morgan CEO] Jamie Dimon, $17 million. Now, granted, those were in stock and less than what some had expected. But are those numbers okay?
THE PRESIDENT: Well, look, first of all, I know both those guys. They’re very savvy businessmen. And I, like most of the American people, don’t begrudge people success or wealth. That’s part of the free market system. I do think that the compensation packages that we’ve seen over the last decade at least have not matched up always to performance. I think that shareholders oftentimes have not had any significant say in the pay structures for CEOs.
Now to be fair, there’s more in Obama’s comments about reforms he’d like, etcetera. (To continue being fair, Obama also makes an inane comparison with million dollar baseball players who don’t make the World Series.)
But of the two, Palin’s statements convey more anger and emotion about the Great Recession, and more directness — however dishonest, however shortlived — about its origins than Obama’s unspeakably stupid, tone-deaf opener “first of all I know both those guys.” Next he’ll be telling us how deeply he’s looked into their eyes. But the real problem is claiming they are beneficiaries of a “free” market. As Paul Krugman points out in his reaction to Obama’s interview (”Clueless”),
“these bank executives are not free agents who are earning big bucks in fair competition; they run companies that are essentially wards of the state. There’s good reason to feel outraged at the growing appearance that we’re running a system of lemon socialism, in which losses are public but gains are private.”
For a variety of reasons, I’ve given up caring why Obama says the things he says or does the things he does. Maybe he was a community organizer once; he walked away from that a long time ago. And I was barely interested in whether the Democratic Party still has a pulse a year from now. It stood for civil rights and prosperity for a growing middle class once — and it didn’t just stand for those things, it enacted them. Now it’s a wretched, hollow shell of an organization, unable to parlay a majority in the House, a (now vanished) supermajority in the Senate, and an electoral landslide for the White House into the accomplishment of its alleged number one goal: meaningful health care reform. Ever since the Massachusetts Senate race loss and the health care reform doldrums, I’ve felt like David Mamet’s line: these guys could f**k up a baked potato.
Now someone like Sarah Palin — a far more dangerous, instinctively able, Nixonian politician than she’s given credit for — is bidding to wrest the populist torch away from the none-too-resisting hands of Obama and the Democrats. And Palin is good enough at what she does to succeed overtly at what Brown did more or less covertly in Massachusetts — assuming the mantle of change, and conveying the hope of momentum for disaffected, fickle, “independent” voters who are rightly bummed and rightly want to throw the bums out. If she isn’t, others are. And Obama, the Democrats, and progressives and liberals who tied their hopes to them will have forfeited the very hope and change that seemed to be the wind in Obama’s sails one short year ago.
Andrew Leonard defends Obama’s performance, complaining: “We’ve got a guy in the White House capable of more nuance than anyone in recent memory, and a political culture that can’t deal with any nuance at all.” Look: nuance and a dollar fifty will buy you a cup of coffee. We don’t need nuance. We need action. We need jobs, we need homes saved, we need health care that doesn’t threaten us with choosing between ruin and death, and oh, we need to get out of a couple of wars and stop the ice caps from melting. The question is how, at what cost - and whether we can believe the people we hire to do the job.
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UPDATE, 2/12: Full Business Week/Bloomberg interview here, via John Judis of The New Republic, who points out that Obama’s choice of known union-basher and FedEx CEO Fred Smith as a CEO he “admires” is pretty disappointing too. Judis: “Overall, the impression the interview leaves is of a president surprisingly oblivious to the fury that is sweeping the nation. Obama has occasionally attempted to speak to it, or read speeches that address it. But this interview shows that, in the choice between Main Street and Wall Street, his natural inclinations lie more toward one side—and it ain’t Main Street.”
UPDATE, 2/14: In a similar vein: Frank Rich NYTimes op-ed Palin’s Cunning Sleight Of Hand.
Category: Post. Tags: democratic party, election10, obama.
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February 11th, 2010 at 3:18 pm
Great post, Thomas. Normally I’m a big fan of nuance. But a politician must respond to the exigencies of the times, and here Obama fails. We needed Alexander the Great, and we got Aristotle. We needed someone with a trial lawyer’s ability to distill a complicated argument into a memorable and stirring summation, and we got a constitutional law professor. And I agree wholeheartedly about the dangers posed by Palin and her ilk.
February 11th, 2010 at 4:38 pm
Thanks, “WWW”. Yes, I think Obama never really got the extent to which Bush, Paulson, and the financial sector took a great big dump on his presidency before it ever got going — and probably never figured they couldn’t believe their eyes when he picked the likes of Geithner and Emanuel to help run the new ship. We needed a new New Deal, we got pretty much the same old deal with a little “hope and change” bow on top. The net spending freeze on the heels of the MA election was the kind of leadership you’d expect of McClellan, not a Lincoln. Like McC, Obama strikes me as someone who is permanently conceding the other side maybe outnumbers him and maybe has a point, rather than of someone who knows what he needs to do to win what he knows he has to win.
February 23rd, 2010 at 6:55 pm
in today’s modern finanical markets — in order to make a buck, all you need to do is get your pals at the FED to print a buck. Of course, the sucker for Wall Street is the general public who saves $. The talk about loans and TARP payback is nothing more than a David Copperfield Jedi mind trick for the uninformed masses. Look up the term Seigniorage or Quant Easing - the official FED name.
May 13th, 2010 at 11:34 am
[...] of course, having the right buddies helps. Remember Obama’s “First of all, I know both these guys”? Again, it’s not actually ethics, just something that is a thing like ethics — call it [...]