I wish it were true.
I wish it were true that Occupy Wall Street could morph into our “American spring,” a left-wing counterweight to the tea party.
Steven Pearlstein is a Pulitzer Prize-winning business and economics columnist at The Washington Post.
I wish it were true that this naive and incoherent movement could somehow turn itself into the long-overdue national protest against speculation and manipulation by a financial services industry that misallocated so much capital and talent and continues to keep much of the global economy on the edge of recession.
I wish it were true that Bank of America’s bone-headed decision to charge a $5 monthly fee for debit cards would prove to be the point at which public opinion finally turned against those who blame government regulation for our economic problems.
I wish it were true that the Obama administration had learned how to channel public anger to lasting political advantage.
When asked about the protests at his news conference last week, President Obama answered with perfect political pitch. Without buying into the exaggerated and uninformed rhetoric of the young protesters, the president aligned himself with the “broad-based frustration about how our financial system works.”
He endorsed the kind of free-market competition that is based on the price and quality of products and services rather than “hidden fees, deceptive practices [and] derivative cocktails that nobody understands and that exposed the entire economy to enormous risks.” And taking a page from the Clinton hymnal, he channeled some of the anger of people who “play by the rules” and are falling behind while those on Wall Street keep getting richer and richer.
And his Treasury secretary? Asked about the protests the previous day at a conference hosted by The Atlantic, here’s a generously edited and cleaned-up version of what Tim Geithner had to say:
“No, I feel a lot of sympathy for what you might describe as the general sense among Americans that we’ve lost a sense of possibility, that after a lost decade of income growth and fiscal irresponsibility, a devastating financial crisis and a huge loss of confidence in public institutions, people do wonder whether we have the ability to do things that can help the average person’s sense of opportunity.”
Got that?
Or how about White House Chief of Staff Bill Daley, outside the same conference, responding to a reporter’s question about whether the protests were helpful to the White House in furthering its economic agenda:
“I don’t know if it’s helpful.”
Trust me on this one, Bill: It’s helpful. And the fact that the White House chief of staff can’t see that and say it publicly is why Barack Obama finds himself in the political pickle he’s in.
I realize Daley has taken it as his personal challenge to repair relations with the business community. But the first thing to point out is that the business community isn’t Wall Street. More significantly, however, you can’t “repair” relations with the business community while its members are pushing back against virtually every one of your initiatives and generously financing the Republican opposition. The way to “repair” your relationship with the business community under such conditions is to provide convincing political evidence that they need to repair their relationship with you.
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