It's hard to see the populist mood afoot in the country lofting to the White House a billionaire mayor who used to work for Salomon Brothers. But three recent moves by Michael Bloomberg can be seen in the context of an independent mayor who sees President Obama's sagging poll numbers and has the ability to get into the 2012 presidential race at a late stage and self-finance if no credible Republican or independent alternative emerges.
First, he opposes Mr. Obama's proposed bank tax, warning it will turn New York City into another Detroit.
Then, he hires Howard Wolfson, who has experience campaigning against Obama as an aide to the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign.
Then, Mr. Bloomberg reverses course and opposes the Obama administration's plan to try Khalid Shaikh Mohammed in New York City.
Rasmussen has some data on how voter views mesh, or don't mesh, with the ideas President Obama expressed in the State of the Union: "The president presented the $787-billion economic stimulus package as a success story. However, just 35% of voters believe the stimulus plan has helped the economy, while 31% believe it hurt."
President Obama had an "intimate White House lunch" on Tuesday with the CEO of Exxon Mobil, Rex Tillerson, and the CEO of JPMorgan Chase, Jamie Dimon, reports the New York Post. This is news in part because, despite the president's boast in the State of the Union address that the White House releases its visitor lists, in fact the names are released only weeks or months afterwards, when it's less newsworthy. It'd be interesting to find out whether all those idealistic young people who volunteered for Obama's "change" campaign in 2008 thought he'd be inviting Mr. Dimon and Mr. Tillerson to lunch in the White House. It makes Mr. Obama's populist campaigning against "selfish," "fat-cat" bankers and their "obscene" profits seem all the more phony.
President Obama said in his State of the Union last night: "It's time to require lobbyists to disclose each contact they make on behalf of a client with my Administration or Congress." There's nothing stopping Mr. Obama, today, from issuing an executive order requiring any executive branch employee to instantly disclose on the Internet any time they are contacted by a lobbyist. Why rely on on the lobbyists rather than on the administration for the disclosure, and why wait for some kind of congressional action or law rather than just going ahead and doing it? The president had said he was going to do this in relation to stimulus spending, though implementation has been spotty. If the administration doesn't want to go all the way on this, it could start with just disclosing the communications that the executive office of the president and the vice president have had with Hyatt Brownstein Farber Schreck LLP. This release from the Campaign Finance Institute reports that Norman Brownstein pledged to raise $1 million for the 2008 Democratic National Convention in Denver at which Mr. Obama was nominated, over and above Mr. Brownstein's law firm partner Steven Farber's efforts as a co-chairman of the convention host committee. Hyatt Brownstein represents, among other clients, First Wind, Apollo Investment Management, and Merck. Or they could start with Wellford Energy Advisors, named for Harrison Wellford, who in 2008, "advised then Senator Obama on White House organization and strategic planning for the Presidential transition during the pre-election period and served as transition advisor to Michelle Obama and Senator Biden." Its clients include Fisker Automotive, Al Gore's electric car company, which got a $529 million loan from the Obama administration's Energy Department.
Bush Speechwriter Michael Gerson: "Promising to change the tone in Washington, he managed to be petty, backward looking, defiant and self-justifying....Tonight, he lost his grip on reality."
Back on November 3, after Berkshire Hathaway's deal to acquire the Burlington Northern and Santa Fe Railroad was announced, FutureOfCapitalism.com wrote, "Compare Burlington Northern Santa Fe's route map with the map of proposed high speed rail projects competing for $8 billion in federal stimulus funding and you can get a sense of some of the opportunities for Berkshire Hathaway and Warren Buffett." President Obama, in his State of the Union address last night, said, "There's no reason Europe or China should have the fastest trains," and said he'd appear at a high-speed-rail related event in Tampa today. The White House is releasing the detailsnow of the high-speed rail projects getting funding, and, sure enough, a lot of the big ones mesh pretty well with the BNSF route map.
Even on health care, where President Obama was trying to assume a posture of humility -- "I take my share of blame for not explaining it more clearly to the American people" -- the effect was off-putting. The problem on health care isn't that Mr. Obama is insufficiently clear, or not a good enough explainer. It's that not even the spectacularly silver-tongued president himself can convince the American people that it's a good idea to pass a 2,000-page bill laden with special favors for Nebraskans or union members or public employees, or that it's possible for the government to save $1 trillion by giving health insurance coverage to 40 million more people. The president's formulation last night is insulting to those skeptical of ObamaCare; it makes them sound like dense students who, if they had only had a teacher who could explain quadratic equations to them more clearly, might not have flunked math. Mr. Obama thinks the problem with ObamaCare was a failure of spin. It's like GM saying if we only had better commercials we could sell more cars. The problem isn't the commercials, it's the cars.
President Obama is at the point with me that I like him better if I don't have to listen to him talk for an hour and ten minutes. It just reminds me of what I don't like.
Here's what I don't like:
First, the lying. "I've never been more hopeful about America's future than I am tonight," the president said. Even the person I was watching with, a big fan of the president, laughed at that line and said, "That's such a lie." Mr. Obama had to have been more hopeful on election night, or on his inauguration day, than after a year in which he couldn't get health care or financial reform through Congress and the Republicans won a Senate seat in Massachusetts.
If you thought that climate change was a matter for merely the Environmental Protection Agency or the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, think again. The Obama administration's Securities and Exchange Commission is taking on the issue, issuing a new "interpretive guidance" with four "areas as examples of where climate change may trigger disclosure requirements." Among the four are the "impact of legislation and regulation" and the "indirect consequences of regulation." Got that? The regulators are now regulating the businesses on what they have to tell their shareholders about regulation. In announcing the interpretive guidance, the SEC chairman, Mary Schapiro, insisted, "we are not opining on whether the world's climate is changing; at what pace it might be changing; or due to what causes. Nothing that the Commission does today should be construed as weighing in on those topics." Got that? The regulators are regulating businesses on what they have to tell their shareholders about the threat of regulation to address a problem that the regulators themselves aren't even willing to admit exists. You can't make this stuff up, you really can't. Anyway, more work for lawyers and investor relations communications firms.
Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen (via the WSJ.com political diary):
I have been particularly harsh on McCain for his irresponsible choice of Sarah Palin as his running mate. ...But what, then, can we make of Kerry's choice of Edwards? It is not quite in the Palin category, since Edwards had been in the Senate for one term and had made a career for himself as a stunningly successful trial attorney. Still, not only did he lack legislative achievement, but, in retrospect, it's clear that little was known about him. He dazzled as a political matinee idol -- a profile, a speech, a mirage of a marriage.
The out-of-nowhere rise of Palin and Edwards in less than a decade is warning enough that something is wrong. I will also throw Barack Obama into the mix, not because I know something nefarious about him but because I realize more and more that I know so little about him.
"Better Off Deadbeat: Craig Cunningham Has a Simple Solution for Getting Bill Collectors Off His Back. He Sues Them," is the headline over a fascinating report in the Dallas Observer on the subculture of people who are actually making money by suing debt-collection agencies for violating the law. Says one: "I already paid them off...The government took my money without asking me and gave it to the banks. And since I owe the banks money, but they already got my money from the government, I say we're even." Another line from the article: "Katz doesn't believe that people are morally obligated to pay back their debts. That notion was invented by debt collectors as a way to beat people into submission, he says." Link via the Browser.
Clifford Asness's latest (which we also covered earlier here) says that Goldman Sachs and other banks that earned big profits in 2009 have essentially four options:
Continue Reading
