An economic recovery depends on the private sector … and the private sectors is run by CEOs.
Does the Prez really think that demonizing business leaders is a way to get their support?
Interesting article in the New Republic.
Here are some snippets …
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From the New Republic …
Valerie Jarrett, the president’s chief liaison to the business community stresses: “Our goal is to foster an environment where companies invest and innovate and grow and expand their employment base in a way that will be good for the country and good for business.”
The business community has spent the past few months locked in an increasingly public squabble with the administration.
Alternately sounding like an outraged populist and a free-market cheerleader, Obama’s balancing act serves mostly to confuse people. He is bashed simultaneously as a market-hating socialist and as a bloodless elitist, uninterested in the suffering of regular Americans. This betwixt-and-between stance is Obama’s trademark brand of thoughtful, noncommittal pragmatism.
To connect with business chieftains at their annual gathering in Washington. the president came with a teleprompter and a prepared speech that was more lecture than invitation to engage. He said his piece, took no questions, and decamped with impolitic alacrity — leaving behind a roomful of disgruntled chief executives still anxious about the White House’s policy aims and unaccustomed to such high-handed treatment. Far from feeling courted, or even understood, some members felt they’d been used as props.
Obama officials, in turn, suggested business was being overly sensitive, unrealistic in its demands, and more than a little ungrateful for all that government had done to stave off an economic apocalypse.
There is, in the words of one Democratic strategist, “a cultural dissonance” at work here.
“I don’t think anything will honestly happen before the election to change the dynamic,” says one administration official. “The business community by and large is sitting and waiting and hoping that we learn a lesson in the election.”
New Republic: Executive Indecision – Obama and the CEOs: He loves them, he loves them not, September 10, 2010 http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/magazine/77394/obama-and-the-ceos-executive-indecision?passthru=Yzc1MWI5ODI2NjFiMWI2MTA3YjdlNDFmZDNjYzIzZjQ
The Homa Files 