Just when you feel totally exasperated by President Obama’s mealy-mouthed, don’t hit me reasonable man meme, along come a passel of two-fisted, tough-talking CEOs to make the President look good. Over at the Daily Beast, Lloyd Grove and McKay Coppins corral a bunch of business big-wigs to get the low-down on the mess in Washington, and the results aren’t pretty.
“I voted for Obama and I’m totally disappointed in him. He is not leading,” groaned New York financial dude Gilbert Harrison to Lloyd and McKay, who describe Gil as “chairman of the boutique investment bank Financo,”* apparently believing that if the President yells loud enough, Congress will do whatever he says.
Grove and Coppins sum up the results of their survey as follows:
Most of the executives, not surprisingly, didn’t fix blame on the Tea Party or House Republicans, who adamantly refused to consider tax hikes as part of a deficit-reduction program that would allow them to vote to raise the federal debt limit by $2.4 trillion—in return for an equal amount in spending cuts over the next decade. With one exception, they didn’t even object to Standard & Poor’s decision to lower the federal government’s credit rating from triple-A to double-A-plus.
Instead, they pointed fingers at Obama and congressional Democrats. “If Lyndon Johnson was still president, he would have knocked heads together and gotten it done,” said Les Berglass, CEO of an executive search firm that places top executives with large consumer-goods companies such as Victoria’s Secret and Land’s End. “If Bill Clinton was president, he would have solved this problem politically in a way that would have avoided the disaster.”
Well, Les, I’m glad you’re an admirer of previous Democratic presidents, but both Lyndon and Bill had booming economies, not the worst world-wide economic contraction since the Great Depression, which made things a lot easier. (And, in his glory days, Lyndon had whopping Democratic majorities as well.)†
But I confess that it’s Lloyd’s and McKay’s “not surprisingly” that really pisses me off. The current “economic crisis” that we’re enduring is entirely the work of the “Tea Party,” called into existence by the outrage over TARP, which in turn was called into existence by the monumental incompetence of the financial wizards of Wall Street, who ran the entire world economy into a ditch and then demonstrated their business acumen by running hat in hand to Washington and begging for another hundred billion or so to get them through payday.
CEOs deal with people they can fire. Politicians deal with people who can fire them. Cowardice is not seldom the truest wisdom in politics. Dodging a bullet is a hell of a lot healthier than taking one, which means that politicians do a lot of ducking and dodging, bobbing and weaving, shucking and jiving. And it isn’t pretty. But when they get criticized by a bunch of soft-handed rich guys for not making the tough decisions, it’s hard not to feel a little sorry for them.
*Fianco! I like that! So foreign! Très boutique!
†Head-knockin’ Lyndon also managed to run up a body count of 58,000+ Americans in Vietnam, in an ass-covering effort to prevent Republicans from calling him soft on communism. Even Barack “I’m just as tough as Rummy” Obama hasn’t done that badly.
