This Sunday Cory Booker (D), Mayor of Newark and rising political star in the Democratic Party, got on Meet the Press and caused quite a stir when he referred to the Obama campaign’s attacks against private equity as “nauseating.” He even went so far as to liken them with character attacks levied by the GOP against Barack Obama for his “relationship” with Reverend Jeremiah Wright.
Within a matter of hours furious Democrats had taken to Twitter expressing everything from disappointment to outrage about the comments and gop.com was proudly displaying a new front page of their website that featured a petition for people to support job creation, to stand with Cory Booker. Booker would very quickly walk back his comments on the Wright comparison, and then would begin work “clarifying” his position on Bain, private equity and his support for the current President.
and a few hours later…
Cory Booker isn’t exactly new on the scene for anyone previously unfamiliar with the name. His unsuccessful bid for mayor of Newark in 2002 was chronicled in the Academy Award nominated documentary “Street Fight.” Sharpe James may have won that election, but it wasn’t exactly a loss for Booker either. His story as the populist upstart to the entrenched, corrupt, sitting mayor was the sort of political narrative that candidates for national office are born from. In 2006 Cory Booker was elected easily and James was in jail just two years later for a collection of fraud charges.
Before Barack Obama erupted onto the scene, Booker’s name had even been thrown around as one of the possibilities for the country’s first black president.
Booker had even been riding a hot streak lately within the party. When Chris Christie vetoed a New Jersey bill that would have legalized gay marriage and gave as a reason that topics like this should be put to a popular vote, Booker responded in pretty dramatic speech in which he decried the notion that matters of equality under the law should be subject to the whims and passions of the majority. Using the example of Jackie Robinson, “thank God” Booker said, that his participation in major league baseball was not decided as a matter of popular opinion.
When Barack Obama made history earlier this month when he became the first sitting US President to come out in favor of gay marriage, Booker’s comments only a few months earlier not only served as one of the most powerful voices in the conversation, it was also clear that he was “there” first.
Booker’s political ambitions are not really a secret, and as a next step while some are pointing to a role as governor, popular opinion seems to be that Booker would run for 88 year old Frank Lautenberg’s Senate seat when he retires. Like politicians at every level, much of Booker’s success or failure going forward will be tied to his ability to fund-raise, and that reality perhaps suggests why Booker would appear on Meet the Press during a Presidential election year, and hit his own candidate’s campaign over their handling of private equity. As a New Jersey politician, Booker’s constituency features a heavy representation of people from the financial services industry.
I asked the question, “what do we actually think Booker would do differently than Obama with financial services,” and the response I got was basically, “nothing.” While that is obviously hypothetical, what is true was that Booker was attacking the Obama campaign’s rhetoric and not their policy. It seemed like Cory Booker, getting on Meet the Press, at a moment when his popularity was peaking, in order to give a wink and a nod to the financial services industry, signaling that they would have a friend in Cory Booker.
The issue isn’t really what Booker said either, most democrats and probably all economists would agree to the necessary, and generally positive role that private equity plays in the economy. The issue is that talking about financial services is a land mine right now that requires lots of rhetorical tact to not come out dirty on either end. Politicians are trying to simulataneously appear tough on irresponsible banking and investment practices, in favor of job growth and haven’t quite figured out how to talk about Mitt Romney’s economic record. But instead of treading lightly, Booker tossed out the sound bite friendly word “nauseating” and in process made himself into a headline.
Romney has spent the better part of the primary season running away from his record as governor, and, as a result has invited the discussion around his record in the private sector because it is the only thing he campaigns on.
Romney at Bain Capital
Given that these are the grounds that Romney has chosen to do battle, little fault can be directed at Romney’s primary opponents or the Obama campaign for digging into the validity of Romney’s chosen platform. What has transpired has been a little bit of everything. Opponents have tried to paint Romney as a Gordon Gekko character, while Romney has cried class warfare in response and mostly ran a campaign on the message of “look, I was in the economy and made a lot of money, I must know the economy.”
It’s hard to disagree with Mitt on that topic. What’s unclear is what Mitt’s private sector experience has to do with job creation, which is an important question considering “creating jobs” has been the central tenet of his message on the economy. The issue here is that Mitt’s talents with the economy seem to lie with the ability to pick winners and losers, and if you follow this republican candidate for president even a little bit, you already appreciate the irony of that. While typically talking about energy when he makes the following statement, Romney has said time and time again that the government shouldn’t be in the business of “picking winners and losers.”
Having talked his way out of his own most valuable skill, Romney was forced to fall back on job creation and get to work spinning a story that his work in private equity created a massive amount of jobs. It’s a tenuous claim and at best you could say Romney’s record as a “job creator” while in private equity was mixed. Worse yet for Romney was that the narrative he chose for his campaign was subject to brutal rebuttal in the cases where his firm came in, squeezed out inefficiencies (jobs, benefits) and turned what had been a successful company into one that no longer exists today. It’s unlikely Romney felt the pain of these actions in the same way members of small town communities did.
Combine this with the recent financial crisis, where many Americans perceived that the same Wall St. bankers who got everyone into trouble were also profiting off of it, and you have the makings of a delicate situation where it is hard to toe the line on attacking Romney’s record without also attacking and demonizing financial services and private equity. It was hard to avoid throwing the baby out with the bath water.
How well that was going thus far for the Obama campaign is up for debate, but it was clear that Cory Booker thought that line had been crossed when he got on national television to say that the Obama campaign’s attack on private equity was “nauseating.” Whether you believe the Obama campaign was legitimately attacking private equity, or whether private equity got picked up in the tread of attacking Romney’s record, what’s clear is that Booker sent a message that there are influential democrats who believe the campaign had gone too far. What’s unclear is why Booker would do that.
The administration’s actual position on the issue is that private equity is an important part of the way our economy maneuvers and the only reason it is a topic of conversation this campaign cycle is because Mitt Romney made it that way. Commentary critical of Romney’s record at Bain is not rooted in criticism inherent in private equity, it is rooted in the fact that Mitt Romney is using his record at Bain as the number one reason why he should be elected President of the United States and there are potentially serious problems with that. Romney is not campaigning to be CEO of a private equity firm, and it is unclear how his past private sector experience would be relevant to the types of decisions he would be asked to make as President.
And when you are President as opposed to the head of a private-equity firm, then your job is not simply to maximize profits. Your job is to figure out how everybody in the country has a fair shot. Your job is to think about those workers who get laid off, and how are we paying for their retraining. Your job is to think about how those communities can start creating new clusters, so that they can attract new businesses. Your job as President is to think about how do we set up an equitable tax system so that everybody is paying their fair share, that allows us then to invest in science and technology and infrastructure, all of which are going to help us grow.
-Barack Obama, addressing NATO yesterday
The big difference is that while Booker cited these negative attacks back and forth between parties as “a distraction” it is pretty clear that Obama and his administration do not feel the same way. For them, these issues are central to not only this campaign, but also the vision of what the country could and should look like.
The question is why? Why are they agreeing on the specific content, that private equity is fine, but one side sees the absolute necessity in continuing the discussion while the other finds it “nauseating?”
In a lot of ways you can probably blame Paul Ryan for all of this. At least I’m going to. Romney has endorsed the Ryan budget, a budget which has caught the attention of lots of folks for a couple major reasons: 1) it ends medicare 2) that it contains historic spending cuts and 3) it contains precious little detail about what those spending cuts actually are.
Romney has joked in the past that he doesn’t like to reveal actual policy in advance of an election because he’s found it to be politically unpopular. He won’t make that mistake again. The only issue is that if he won’t tell us any of what he intends to do once elected, we need to have conversations about character and history. We need to feel like we have a sense of what he would do.
This is the point where two men of similar ideology appear to have disagreed on how to handle Mitt Romney. Booker saw the issue of private equity more narrowly than Obama did. On the topic of private equity, as a standalone issue, they share similar opinions. However, because Mitt Romney has not only made his career in private equity the centerpiece of his campaign, but also been deliberately obscure about what he would do with a federal budget, private equity takes on a different significance. The question the Obama campaign is asking is, “when private equity man Mitt Romney says he could handle the economy, what does he actually mean? What would he actually do?”
Where Cory Booker thought we were just talking about private equity, Obama is talking about where this country would go were it to be guided by the economic conscience of profit maximization.
Grand Plans; Great Doubt 