Obama’s Business- Friendly Optics Are an Illusion: Caroline Baum.

Jan, 25. Who says President
Barack Obama didn ’t get the message of the 2010
midterm elections?
In the last few weeks alone, the president
reconfigured his inner circle to look less like
America and more like Bill Clinton ’s White House.
He appointed one of those formerly disparaged
“ fat-cat bankers,” William Daley, as his chief of
staff. Daley was Clinton’s Commerce Secretary
and hails most recently from JPMorgan Chase &
Co.
He retooled the President’s Economic Recovery
Advisory Board, led by former Federal Reserve
Chairman Paul Volcker, into the President ’s
Council on Jobs and Competitiveness, elevating
General Electric Co. Chief Executive Jeffrey Immelt
to the helm. “Jobs” and “competitiveness” are the
new buzzwords, to be featured prominently in
what is surely the most previewed State of the
Union address in history this evening. (Jobs were
supposed to be “the No. 1 focus in 2010,”
according to Obama’s speech last year.)
In keeping with the new message -- “I get it” --
Obama signed an executive order instructing all
federal agencies to review regulations and
remove those that stifle job creation and reduce
competitiveness. He unveiled his initiative in a Jan.
18 op-ed that appeared in, of all places, the Wall
Street Journal. Not the New York Times or
Washington Post, but the Journal, whose editorial
page bills itself as the voice for “free markets and
free people.” How symbolic.
Voter Outreach
Obama’s business outreach trickled down to the
office of the vice president, where Joe Biden
tapped former Clinton aide Bruce Reed, head of
the centrist Democratic Leadership Council, to be
his new chief of staff.
The president’s efforts, including his capitulation
on an extension of the Bush tax cuts for all
Americans, have paid off. His approval rating
jumped to 49.8 percent this month, up from
45.6 percent at the time of the election, according
to the Real Clear Politics average.
So is this just a public relations gambit designed
to win back independents and assuage business
concerns to ensure money and votes in 2012?
Of course it is. The real question is will there be
any follow-through?
A careful reading of Obama’s words suggests
he’s still stuck in a central-planning mindset.
Obama introduces each new appointee as
someone who knows how to “grow the
economy” and create jobs. The president has
been pressing his economic team to come up
with job-creating ideas “that excite me,”
according to Peter Baker’s cover story in the New
York Times Magazine on Sunday.
Conflict of Interest
Clearly the 3.5 million jobs “created or saved” by
Christy Romer’s econometric model (Romer was
chairman of the president’s Council of Economic
Advisers until September) didn’t convince
anyone. Now Obama wants real jobs, more than
the 1.3 million private-sector positions created in
2010, to buy him real votes.
Of course, Obama could have elevated Richard
Trumka, president of the AFL-CIO, from his
economic advisory committee to the top spot
instead of Immelt, who has regular business
before the administration and received a $16.1
billion Federal Reserve bailout in 2008. But why
create the appearance of conflict of interest?
Obama doesn’t need any more advisers to tell
him the U.S.’s 35 percent corporate tax rate,
among the highest in the world, puts the nation
at a competitive disadvantage. Or that taxing
overseas profits when they ’re repatriated to the
U.S. doesn’t encourage businesses to bring that
money home and invest here.
Bureaucratic Suicide
On the regulatory front, Obama’s intention to
submit all federal rules and regulations to a cost-
benefit analysis sounds nice, but what bureaucrat
has ever declared himself redundant and written
himself out of a job?
It reminds me of a joke about the tourist who
goes to visit the Agriculture Department. As he’s
walking down a long, empty hallway, he hears
the sound of crying coming from an office. The
tourist peaks his head in and asks the employee,
sobbing at his desk, “What’s the matter?”
“My farmer died,” the employee replied.
The Department of Agriculture, like any
government agency, never willingly cedes a part
of its fiefdom.
In the 1700s, the U.S. was an agrarian nation with
90 percent of workers engaged in farming,
according to Veronique de Rugy, senior research
fellow at George Mason University ’s Mercatus
Center in Arlington, Virginia. Today the U.S.
economy has highly productive agribusinesses
employing less than 2 percent of all (legal)
workers. Yet “the federal government continues
to subsidize agriculture,” de Rugy said. “Spending
for the Department of Agriculture in real terms
went from $95 billion in 2000 to $142 billion in
2010. ”
Double Talk
Obama’s major legislative initiatives -- health care
and financial reform -- left it to regulators to write
the rules necessary to implement the laws. To
order a review of federal regulations in the face of
so many to-be-written laws is talking out of both
sides of your mouth.
So nice try, Mr. Obama. You’ll have to do better
than executive orders and executive
appointments to convince us you have the
wherewithal of a business executive.
(Caroline Baum, author of “Just What I Said,” is a
Bloomberg News columnist. The opinions
expressed are her own.)
--Editors: Steve Dickson, Charles W. Stevens
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Source: Http://www.businessweek.com/news/2011-01-24/obama-s-business-friendly-optics-are-an-illusion-caroline-baum.html