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I focused on fundraising in my story yesterday about the President and Bain Capital, but I should double back and say that the actual argument Obama made is a fairly sound one on the merits. He basically said that the role of a President bears no resemblance to the role of a business leader, particularly a private equity or leveraged buyout specialist. One should have a concern on how to create jobs and the other has what amounts to a fiduciary duty to create profit. And those simply aren’t always compatible.
Let’s set aside for a moment how this pairs with reality, a topic I believe I’ve discussed about as much as humanly possible. On the content itself, this is an example of a good myth to bust. Over the last decade or so, we’ve had an endless amount of cant over the fact that government “should be run like a business” and that the best leader of such a government would be a businessman. You would think that the fact that the only President ever to have an MBA was George W. Bush would have punctured this axiom, but no, just four years after his departure in disgrace, Republicans nominate a businessman for President, someone running really entirely on the strength of that business experience. You could be forgiven for not knowing that Mitt Romney was once the Governor of Massachusetts; he certainly won’t tell you. So it really is a case of a businessman Presidential hopeful.
And it’s worth making the point, then, that the two jobs have fundamentally different foci. Steve Rattner makes this case today in the New York Times, but I think former Reagan budget director David Stockman made it better and more succinctly when he went off the reservation on Fox Business Channel:
Stockman: I don’t think Mitt Romney can legitimately say that he learned anything about how to create jobs in the LBO (leveraged buyout) business. The LBO business is about how to strip cash out of old, long-in-the-tooth companies and how to make short-term profits for…
(CROSSTALK)
Q: But he had so many new jobs created for all the jobs that were lost, it was a net gain, no?
Stockman: I don’t think so. All the jobs that he talks about came from Staples. That was a very early venture stage deal, that they got out of long before it got to its current size.
We have become inured to business titans being treated like masters of the universe, striding across the earth like a Homunculus, able to do anything they set their minds to. It’s worth having a corrective to this. Business acumen is often about stripping profits, and in this case that was really the only focus. People didn’t enter into the equation. The job of a responsible politician is a much more multi-faceted one. So while wankers on ABC can go on mournfully about the “death of the man who wanted to bring people together,” in reality, the President really just popped the balloon about the easy transference of skills from the business world to the political world. And regardless of everything else, the President is right about that. That’s why polls now show, correctly, that most people believe Mitt Romney was concerned about profits at Bain Capital, not jobs.
Moreover, Romney KNOWS he’s right about that. That’s why he wants to change the subject very quickly. You now have Romney arguing explicitly that the election is not about Bain Capital, as he tries to shift the focus back onto the economy. In other words, Romney is running on nothing, as a cipher, trying to make the election a referendum rather than a choice.
If the fallout of this is that we don’t revere business titans for their untrammeled ability to give the little people jobs anymore, it will be a positive step.
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the job creators are really consumers.
business doesnt create jobs unless there is demand — read cash — to spend on the product or service.
how many cars can a billionaire buy and drive? how many pairs of pants?
you need tens of millions with cash to spend to drive an economy.
profits are at a 40-year high and unemployment is at a 40-year high.
if all it took were profits in the hands of the 1%, we would be awash in jobs, but we are not.
That’s because the real job creators dont have money to spend on goods.
the business people who run companies hoard their money when there is no reason to hire to increase production.
I thought Obama spoke very well and that he identified Romney’s political personna accurately.
The problem is that Obama’s political personna has been about a half-inch to the left of that. And HE is the one who came in with that huge mandate for change, and those big margins in both houses…and who has utterly, unspinnably, squandered about 90% of it.
Nailing your opponent with the truth about his view of the presidency doesn’t mean a lot, if you had all the tools to oppose and change that view, and instead, you bent over and spread cheek for the same view.
I could have saved some bandwidth with:
“Talk is cheap…and after 3 and a half years of “bipartisan stupidity” , it’s probably going to get you fired, Mr. Preznint.”
Good points, Peter.
I would add that those business people are running scared. We’ve been hearing about how much money is moving overseas, to “safe” havens. I suspect that what we’ve heard about is just the tip of the iceberg.
The people in Greece sleeping outside of ATM’s could well be a harbinger of things to come, here.
I think the republicans, not just Romney, ARE, in large measure, trying to make it a referendum instead of a choice. I think they’re succeeding.
And Obama, with his flaccid “bipartisanship”, has played right into their hands. He needed to differentiate himself from the republicans immediately when he came in, and instead he’s become practically indistinguishable from them. Now, all he can do is revert to campaign-kabuki bullshit about being the good-guy “reformer”…and anyone who’s paid attention, or is jacked-to-the-wall economically, knows that’s nonsense.
“Business people as masters of the universe…” That’s how they want to be seen.
and “It’s worth having a corrective to this.”
The voters of america damn sure did our part, when we helped Obama double John McCain’s electoral vote and handed the democrats big margins in both houses of congress. That was the corrective. We just didn’t expect that Obama would stash it in the cupboard while it rotted away.
Which stashing raises the question:
What would be different if he wins in November…with, it’s a certainty, far less clout and less enthusiasm from the voters?” As little as he’s accomplished with the near-landslide that he came in with, why expect anything else this time around, given that the GOP will almost certainly keep the House, if not take the Senate?
I don’t think anything will be different, except he won’t have to face the voters again. Some of the worst things Bill Clinton did were done in his 2nd term.
B. Clinton has made what, $75 million in speaking fees in the last decade? This is where Obama is headed.
Wall Street bought Obama’s election. It was a good investment for them.
~
‘Thunder; no argument on anything there.
There IS the ongoing debate about whether it was a conspiracy from the start, or just Obama’s cowardice and a really foolish presumption that in return for his “bipartisan” caving, the republicans would help him with some vestige of a salvage operation. That was never going to happen.
I think he was more of a corporatist than most of us thought, and he’s also been a political coward of the first order. And, as you say, I don’t see that changing, even if he wanted it to.