The 2008 Election is nearly over, and it is one for the history books. With Senator Obama well on his way to becoming President Obama, I thought I would share with you some of the things that I worry about, regardless of my feelings about the election outcome itself, which pleases me greatly. I really do not have answers for these things; only concerns.
How Well Can Barack Obama Bond with Other Politicians?
Politics is perhaps the ultimate “people business.” We know for certain that Barack Obama is outstanding in his ability to bond with voters from a distance – in speeches, on television, at public events, etc. What I cannot determine at this point is whether Barack Obama can bond well with people up close – with his cabinet members, with the leadership of the House and the Senate, and with the myriad of other people on whom his Presidency will depend.
It’s a legitimate question and “interpersonal skill” is a talent that is simply invaluable in a President. Jimmy Carter was, for example, very intelligent, and an excellent and able campaigner, who I did get to watch up close, but he and his staff were simply disasters when it came to the insider’s game in Washington.
I have admired Jimmy Carter much more as a world citizen than I ever admired him in Washington, D.C., where his loner mentality and aloofness wore thin very quickly. The problem Carter had was the discontinuity between his campaign personality, which was all “southern hospitality and graciousness” and his real personality, which was cool, aloof, and often downright unfriendly. Many of the people on staff were just like him.
Carter was replaced by the ultimate “people person” in modern politics, President Ronald Reagan. Whereas Reagan’s policies would earn him many enemies, he had a gift for the small gestures of humanity and kindness , and a genuine warmth, that made him well liked by the people with whom he had to work in Washington, D.C., Republicans and Democrats alike. Democratic Speaker Tip O’Neil, on his retirement, jokingly complained that Reagan was simply too personable to dislike, even when he disagreed with him.
Bill Clinton is also a natural “people person.” Mayor Rudy Giuliani told me at dinner once that he thought Bill Clinton was the single more charming person that he had ever met in politics, maybe too charming for his own good. I never met Clinton, but many others have said the same thing to me.
I have never met Barack Obama either, so I do not know him. I was not in St. Thomas on the two occasions when he visited. Does he have the interpersonal charm and warmth – the people skills – to have a successful Presidency? I simply don’t know, but I worry about it. He faces a huge crisis of confidence in our American institutions where “up close and personal” people skills can make or break him, so I expect that we will all find out soon enough how skilled he is for his role.
Doing a Lot, With a Lot Less Money:
I have followed this campaign closely from the beginning, as you know. I share with most people an appreciation of Obama’s intelligence, eloquence and grace under fire. He started his campaign, however, 18 months or so ago in a substantially different world compared to the one in which we find ourselves today. No President in modern times has faced such a daunting range of financial challenges, with so little real money (as opposed to more massive debt) to spend on most of them. Obama will have overwhelming control over the entire government, which is very helpful in a crisis; but he is going to need to reconsider all of his priorities in the face of the short term fiscal future we face. Can he do this kind of about face after promising so many things? Will he do it? Again, I do not know! Unless he can change direction, however, recognizing the reality of our fiscal situation, we will all be the losers
.
Most modern politicians, unfortunately, face problems by simply throwing money at them, in the often misguided hope that some of it will stick and improve the situation. If they throw money at problems, the politicans will at least appear to be doing something they can brag about to the folks back home.
If Obama and the Democrats go down this well traveled road, they will simply explode the national debt, devaluing more the dollar and undermining the future for our children and grandchildren. Moreover, they are facing over the next eight years an explosion of costs for Medicare and Social Security, which will demand an ever greater share of our national wealth, and this is entirely on top of the hundreds of billions we have committed to holding off the credit crisis.
No very large problem, like the fiscal crisis, is solved by any single response, and this very large and growing fiscal crisis in spending requires a myriad of smaller steps, many of which will force the redirection of dollars from those that currently get them to others who desperately need them.
Basically, the Federal Government “gives away” vast amounts of money to interests for their support of incumbents. We’ve been doing so long that it seems a given that we have to keep on doing it. When you look at the many ways we waste truly “vast” sums of money, old John McCain’s “earmark crusade” seems pretty trivial.
However, if anyone would like to do more with less, here would be my suggestions, none of which I actually expect to happen:
- Immediately raise taxes more broadly, generating more revenue early in the first year of the administration and throughout. However, the Democrats would be attacked viciously as the “tax and spend political party” and John McCain will be the first to say, “I told you so!” One thing is certain, there isn’t enough wealth among the wealthy, by themselves, to buy our way out of this mess, and every reasonably educated person knows it.
- Get General Colin Powell to lead a large, very public effort to restructure and redeploy our defense spending: closing operations in Germany, Japan, and Korea (assuming that those governments are perfectly capable of taking care of themselves); ending our involvement in Iraq more quickly than planned, turning the costs over to the oil rich Iraqi government: closing dozens of unnecessary bases in the United States, and restructuring the cost of the overhead of defense spending to streamline the military services. Just like in our schools, the American military suffers from an acute case of “grade inflation,” only these are “pay grades” for generals and their staff, certainly unmatched in American military history, and everyone knows this as well as I do.
- End entirely all subsidies to the oil, coal, and natural gas industries, with law enforcement and auditing that force those fat cats to pay the same taxes imposed on small companies. If need be, nationalize the American fields and funnel that revenue into the government, just as is happening all over the rest of the world. Americans are really fed up with turning over our natural wealth to these bloated companies who do not pay close to a fair share in taxes for the wealth we give them, but turn around and spend a fortune on paid propaganda and campaign contributions to mislead the American taxpayer.
- Create a two or even three tiered system of capital gains taxes that actually reduces the taxes made on investments in smaller, high risk ventures and increases the capital gains on investments in larger established enterprises. The investments in smaller businesses, those under $100 million in revenue, usually translate directly into jobs faster than any other type of enterprise. If you look at the history of job creation in America, the new domestic jobs almost all come from smaller companies and the larger companies contribute almost no net new jobs -- they ship them overseas to lower labor cost markets as quickly as they are able.
- End all subsidies to agriculture since almost all of the subsidies fall into the hands of the five percent of the largest commercial agricultural companies and do not help smaller farmers at all. Subsidizing agriculture just drives up prices for consumers, allows the rich corporate farmers to get richer still, and contributes only to the profits generated by the powerful agricultural lobby. And, if you want to help consumers, lower the barriers on all agricultural products imported to the United States.
- End the iron clad control of the pharmaceutical companies over the price and supply of drugs in the United States, allowing the importation of “certified” drugs from other places in the world, the on line purchase of certified drugs, the easy importation of certified drugs from Canada and Mexico. By certified, I mean simply to have the FDA test the drugs chemically to insure that they are exactly what they are supposed to be, and that they are on the approved list of the FDA. The drug companies will scream with outrage and propaganda, but the consumers will love the FDA for a change.
- Change the entire corporate tax code so that all companies, regardless of their size and tax status, foreign and domestic, pay exactly the same percentage of their revenues – not some phony and manipulated profits – in taxes; a single flat tax that applies to every business, large or small, foreign or domestic, private or public in the United States. That will level the business playing field and eliminate all of the political benefits that the largest companies gain by playing with their costs and revenues and manipulating the politicians whom they have purchased in our nation’s capital.
- Eliminate the application of Sarbanes-Oxley to all companies with revenues of less than $500 million per year. At my old company, Harris Interactive, that would add at least $2 million in taxable income alone, reducing dramatically the exorbitant legal and accounting fees imposed on these companies. Do not punish, in effect, millions of companies and their shareholders for the misbehavior of a handful of giants, who would have been more impressed with $1 Billion added to our corporate law enforcement agencies than they are with Sarbanes-Oxley. If you don’t know it, these laws were written by the huge accounting and law firms, and they are nothing more than a welfare system for those that wrote the laws.
- Take the $50 Billion that the Federal Government currently spends on education and direct those monies toward the most underfunded school districts in America, eliminating most of the Department of Education in the process. There are many inexpensive ways to fix primary and secondary education in America, but they are blocked by the impenetrable wall of the public employee unions who control educational policies in the 50 states.
These are just a handful of the ways we can redirect the revenues of the Federal Government, and there are actually a whole lot more, many of them advocated for years by people who understand what the government does and does not do well.
End the Circulation of a Very Tired Elites:
The people in power in the Republican Administration have blown it. They obviously have to go, and that will happen. At the same time, if the tired old elite of the Republicans is replaced with an equally tired old elite of Democrats – the same faces in new chairs -- absolutely nothing will happen. America is filled with talent, and the best talent isn’t hanging around Washington, D.C., waiting, maneuvering and posturing for a cushy new job title to add to their resume.
Every great crisis, and we have one now, is an opportunity to change the entire playing field for the better (ans sometimes the worse). There are thousands of talented Americans with real ideas of how to do more with less, of how to get more performance out of the dollars we spend, of how to change the rotten system of interest group politics that destroys all of our opportunities in the name of their own narrow self-interest. This crisis is no different. It is a huge opportunity, but only if President Barack Obama and his key advisors make it one. That is the ultimate challenge we face; that soon-to-be President Barack Obama faces! I can always hope, for as the Bard says, “hope springs eternal in the human breast.”.
Just my opinion,
Gordon Black
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