King of Fools

Mitt Romney weighs in on the AIG bonus scandal and reminds us what a tragedy it is that he's not the President.

The news that employees at AIG are on the verge of being rewarded $165 million in bonuses at a time when the insurance giant is on the verge of collapse is rightly shocking to taxpayers who have pumped billions into the company to keep it afloat. Of course, the Obama administration was wrong to initially defend the bonuses as contractually obligated. In 1990, I was asked to assume the CEO position at the management consulting firm Bain & Co., then in acute financial distress. The need to restructure was paramount or else the company would fail, leaving 1,000 employees without a job. We renegotiated debt with bankers. We rewrote leases with landlords. We designed a whole new governing system. We also had to convince the founding partners to turn back profits they had already taken out of the company. Of course, we had no legal basis for making such a request, but without a shared sacrifice we couldn’t keep the company alive. Generously, the founders returned the money, putting us on a path to stabilizing the firm and turning it over to new leadership. It’s difficult to understand why the same lesson about shared sacrifice is lost on AIG’s executive team and their government overseers.

The odd thing is that Mitt Romney has proved conclusively that rescuing things is good politics. While the resurrection of Bain & Co. made Romney a rich man, the Lazarus routine on the Salt Lake 2002 Winter Olympics made him governor of Massachusetts. Its hard to image Obama etal wanting to fail, but as even Obama supporters are discovering, hope, finally, isn't a strategy.

Not long ago, after a string of especially bad days for the Obama administration, a veteran Democratic pol approached me with a pained look on his face and asked, "Do you think they know what they're doing?"

The question caught me off guard because the man is a well-known Obama supporter. As we talked, I quickly realized his asking suggested his own considerable doubts.

Yes, it's early, but an eerily familiar feeling is spreading across party lines and seeping into the national conversation. It's a nagging doubt about the competency of the White House.

The worries have turned into polite pleas and gentle criticism from such Obama supporters as Ignatius and Broder of the Washington Post.

Everyone is dancing around the real cause of public disgust here--the AIG folks are doing nothing that Congress hasn't been doing for two months now--raiding the hen house.

Wallstreet attracts greedy bastards the way dumps attract seagulls, but they are pikers compared to Congress. The collusion of the Obama White House with Nancy Pelosi's mafia in the House resulted in a stimulus bill that delivered a mere 7% of its near trillion dollar price tag for actual economic stimulus this year. Even Bernie Madoff didn't have the balls for a rip-off on that scale.

This isn't lost on Americans, 82% of which regard the recent antics of Congress as deeply worrisome. Like Broder and Ignatius, they are holding on to vain hope that Obama actually does have a plan. He doesn't.

Who is more stupid, the King of fools, or the fools that made him King?