You’re angry. You’re mad. You’re frustrated. You’re confused. You’re steamed. At times, when you get especially low, you might even be miffed.
Everyone gets this by now. Even Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and the rest of Team Obama (finally) get this. Chris Dodd, when not dodging TV cameras, says he gets this. Republicans, whenever a TV camera approaches, insist they get this.
Bill Clinton felt your pain. Barack Obama feels a nation’s worth of disdain, which he’s painfully trying to do something about.
The question is — and please excuse the sentence-ending preposition, but these are perilous times in which we live — who are you mad at? It’s the political question of the day, and the answer may tell us everything.
Republicans are betting that you’re mad not just at AIG but also at the stimulus-package-passing Democrats who gave all that money to AIG — and remind you that, in the House, Republicans voted unanimously against the package.
Democrats have a different approach. They think you’re far more angry at the bonus grabbers at AIG than you are at Chris Dodd and that your anger goes to something far more fundamental (and far more politically toxic) — what Obama described as the “bubble and bust economy that valued reckless speculation over responsibility and hard work.”
There was an interesting version of this fight played out on the House floor Thursday, when they passed a 90 percent AIG Bonus Baby Tax that applies to companies taking more than $5 billion — as in billion — in TARP money and passing along bonuses greater than $250,000. In other words, it was a tax-the-rich tax hike that only about half the House Republicans could bring themselves to vote for, no matter how angry they were at AIG.
If you think hard about this, you hear the echoes of an old argument. Who do you think the rich guys are in the original trickle-down theory of taxation? You don’t have to be told how these particular rich guys — the ones who took the bonus money after nearly killing the company — trickled down on the rest of us.
And if you look closely, there’s more to see. As Suzy Khimm wrote in the New Republic, Republican senators like Jim DeMint were calling the bailout bill “pure socialism” and executive pay caps “outlandish” and “a sad day in America.” And now, six weeks later in America, DeMint and others wrote a letter demanding to know why AIG seemed to have been excluded from this pure socialism of pay caps.
Actually, the “ism” in question here is populism. And no doubt you’ll hear warnings of Obama as the new Huey Long — instead of the new FDR — and the dangers of the mob. But Obama has to see an opportunity here for real change. You’re seeing market solutions being discredited at every turn. Now what Obama has to do, in the post-Bush era, is rebuild faith in government.
Let’s just say Obama has struggled so far. Of course, he’s not exactly a populist or for that matter — sorry, boys — a socialist. He’s a pragmatist who was slow to anger over the AIG bonuses because he’s slow to anger, period. I’m guessing he was too busy, as many of us were, working on his NCAA brackets. But when he went to California to hang out with Arnold and Jay Leno, he also did some town-hall meetings to make clear he was as angry as anyone.
He told reporters he didn’t want to “quell” people’s anger, and while “quell” isn’t a word you hear often on the trail, you don’t often hear about $165 million in “retention” bonuses, either. What politician wouldn’t want to retain that anger?
And yet, what we had been hearing from Geithner was that though the bonuses were regrettable, there was nothing to be done about them. Nothing? Seriously. It’s US versus AIG — like UNC versus Radford — and nothing? This was another in a string of rookie mistakes from your favorite bailout team. As Barney Frank pointed out, the taxpayers own an 80 percent stake in AIG and so, of course, there had to be something.
Then there is the Chris Dodd affair and the question of who changed the stimulus bill to allow the AIG bonuses, and why no one will give us a straight answer. Dodd said it was a nameless Obama person who made him write in the change. This was supposed to be the administration of transparency, but what’s clear is — again — nothing.
Meanwhile, David Axelrod, Obama’s consigliere, told the Washington Post that the bonus issue was a “distraction” and said, “People are not sitting around their kitchen tables thinking about AIG. They are thinking about their own jobs.”
Of course, people are thinking about AIG, in their kitchens and everywhere else. Obama’s people may have been worried about villainizing Wall Street when asking taxpayers to spend trillions to bail out these same villains. And so when the rest of us learn one lesson from, say, the $35,000 commode, the Obama people thought the real lesson was that it’s dangerous to stoke public anger.
That was then — in the pre-Leno days. Now we’re in full stoke mode, and, if you’re looking to be stoked, check the numbers cited by Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne: A 2007 study showed the top 50 investment fund managers made 19,000 times more than the average worker.
These are historic numbers, and they tell the wrong kind of American history. Obama wants to do big things in a historically bad economy — things like health care and energy. All he needs to do is understand how to channel the anger out there. Maybe tell him it’s just another kind of March madness.
Mike Littwin writes Sundays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Reach him at 303-954-5428 or mlittwin@denverpost.com.
