Steelworkers make better victims than 50-year-old government retirees.
By Holman W. Jenkins - The Wall Street Journal
Who says Wall Streeters arent filled with a desire to please? Two big-name Democratic financiers Roger Altman & Steven Rattner
may not be ready to defend the presidents deceitful Bain ads. But they promptly took to the airwaves to defend the presidents defense of the ads after President Obama himself issued a few syllables they could cling to saying the ads merely questioned whether profit maximization is an appropriate governing principle.
Which of course has nothing to do with anything. It certainly has nothing to do with the Bain ads. The ads arent meant to engage viewers in a discussion of the limits of the profit motive. The ads are about pure
ressentiment.
The word is French and was once adopted by philosophers as diverse as Kierkegaard Nietzsche and Weber. It describes a kind of moral scapegoating of others to explain our disappointments and dissatisfactions.
Wikipedia is especially instructive in the matter: Sartre also used the term bad faith for the habit of blaming others for our plight.
Mr. Obamas great political talent has been his knack for granting his admirers permission to think highly of themselves for thinking highly of him. The self-approval of his supporters is the engine of his political rise albeit married to the kind of hardball that drove his two most formidable rivals out of the 2004 Senate race in divorce-related scandals.
But now theres a problem. In a presidential re-election race the formula is inconvenienced by the existence of a very public record of things done and said of persistent joblessness and sluggish growth and one big issue that threatens to dwarf the Obama allure altogetherthe entire industrial worlds rendezvous with insolvency.
Heres the real message of the Bain ads. The ads may invoke classic private-equity slurs like looter and stripper but the real message is that private equity is exactly what it says it is: a bringer of efficiency and rationalization. Mr. Romney the ads say wants to take things away from you that he claims no longer are affordable; Mr. Obama the ads say will fight whoever tries to take things away. To the less sophisticated voter the Obama message is a soothing nothing has to change. To the more sophisticated President Obama proposes himself as the defender of every spending interest never favoring a cut always pushing for higher taxes.
Look at Europe. Look at California. This strategy can work electorally. As policy it may be unbelievable irrational and misleadinglike Gov. Jerry Brown clinging to his bullet train. But it makes a kind of political sense.
Mr. Browns politics in fact are worth studying. His state is flirting with fiscal collapse. Businesses and workers are fleeing its high taxes. Yet he defends a perfectly senseless plan to build a $68 billion high-speed rail to nowhere. His message to his states spending interests: Im your guy. No compromise. As in Greece where austerity has meant the private sector shrinks but the government doesnt so in California if Mr. Brown has anything to say about it.
Politicians who work this vein are careful not to be heard actually saying everything is affordable. But voters get the message the rich will pay. If the proceeds of the Buffett tax were proportional to the noise Mr. Obama has made promoting it the Buffett tax alone would solve our fiscal problems (in fact its impact would be negligible).
The
ressentiment campaign then is not about the legitimacy of capitalism which isnt really in question. Its about Scott Walker in Wisconsin; its about Chris Christie in New Jersey. The symbolic victims in Obamas Bain ads are steelworkers only because a 50-year-old retiree living on a government pension doesnt make a compelling victim. The villains are rich bankers because the average taxpayer doesnt make a good villain. The Bain ads are about the spending wars and those who benefit from government largess and those who foot the bill.
Mr. Romney should be happy to fight on these grounds. A lot of votersknown as taxpayersworry about the economic future. Mr. Obamas stance of lets preserve and expand the handouts and to hell with tomorrow frightens them. Quite possibly some decipher the Obama ads exactly as Team Obama intends but like the ring of Mr. Romneys private-equity history. It has nothing to do with putting profits above peopleand everything to do with stopping the rot.
The biggest guessing game for voters of course is whether these campaigns actually have any bearing on what would happen after Election Day. Mr. Romney is already being slagged for not saying what he would cut. Mr. Obama is slagged for pretending the ship can be righted without cutting. Politics remains the art of the possible. Its always likely whoever wins the great American consensus machine will settle back on stalling and doing nothing until some greater financial crisis hits. But a constructive new gravitational force has begun to act in our politics too: Its called Simpson-Bowles.
A version of this article appeared May 30 2012 U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal with the headline: The Bain Ads Are About Spending.
