Yeah, yeah – one day you’re going to write the Great American Novel. But it’s already been done. And it’s not Moby Dick – too odd and impenetrable for most folks. And it’s not Huckleberry Finn – that’s still a lighthearted kids’ book, where the resonances of deep meaning may be happy accidents. Nope, the Great American Novel is F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby – that long meditation on wealth, and gaining wealth, and its wonderfulness, and the damage it can do. It’s about the aspiration to make it big in America – which is noble and romantic and idealistic, and tawdry and dangerous, at the same time. The novel’s narrator, Nick Carraway, has no idea what to make of the mysterious Jay Gatsby, the man of equally mysterious wealth – but he does admire him, as a sort of noble soul. It seems Gatsby got rich beyond the dreams of avarice for only one purpose – to win back his childhood sweetheart, the lovely Daisy. It’s the story of one man’s quest for the woman of his dreams, and that’s all terribly romantic and all that. But that Daisy’s heart can be won by the man with the most stuff, and the right stuff, the good stuff and not cheap imitations, makes her a shallow twit. Gatsby wants to win her heart. She may not have one. And at the end of the novel, with Gatsby floating dead in the swimming pool with a bullet in his back, Nick Carraway – Fitzgerald’s voice and ours – says that Gatsby was the only good one of that sorry lot of rich folks hanging around their mansions out on Long Island. The rest were careless people – “they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together – and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”
So there you have it – the masterful novel about the American Dream – about making it big and having all the goodies, and being the charming good guy too, and also winning the hearts and minds of others. And then some confused and angry low-life loser, enraged by the deadly carelessness of the idle rich, shoots you dead, by mistake. He shoots the wrong guy. Oh well. There are ambiguities within ambiguities within ambiguities in all this. We really don’t know how we feel about the rich, or the American Dream. Fitzgerald did so admire the rich. But perhaps he considered himself foolish for it – like the rest of us.
Fitzgerald’s buddy from his Paris days, Ernest Hemingway, found Fitzgerald’s attitude toward the rich insufferable and according to Hemingway, he once had this conversation with Fitzgerald:
Fitzgerald: The rich are different than you and me.
Hemingway: Yes, they have more money.
Everyone agrees that conversation never actually took place, and Fitzgerald, in his short story “The Rich Boy” (1926) actually lays out what he really meant:
Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft, where we are hard, cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand.
And that fascinated him. In fact, Fitzgerald spent his last few years in Hollywood in an apartment right here on North Laurel Avenue just a few doors down the street. When he died here he was working of The Last Tycoon – he was still trying to figure it all out. But aren’t we all?
And now we have to figure out Mitt Romney, and decide whether he’s Jay Gatsby or Gordon Gekko – that nasty fellow for the Oliver Stone movie, Wall Street. And that’s because the debate among the Republican candidates over Mitt Romney’s time at Bain Capital has raised questions, again, about whether Romney’s tenure there, as a true One Percent guy, will damage his campaign. Do they hammer him with that? The Obama folks certainly love the idea and have been attacking in obvious ways:
The day after Mr. Romney squeezed out a razor-thin victory in the Iowa caucuses, Mr. Obama’s political brain-trust trained most of its fire on him, painting him as both a Wall Street 1 percent type and an unprincipled flip-flopper.
And there has been detailed statistical research on how folks feel about Romney and his stunning success and what that means for Obama, which John Sides summarizes here:
Here is the problem that Romney confronts. Americans perceive him as personally wealthy more than they do Obama. They perceive him as caring more about the wealthy, but less about “people like me” and the middle class, than does Obama. Moreover, Obama can “get away with” being perceived as personally wealthy or caring about the wealthy in ways that Romney cannot. For Americans, Romney’s personal wealth is more intimately tied to the perception that he cares about the wealthy – and this in turn implies that he cares less for the middle class.
There are a lot of pretty bar charts that go along with that, but David Frum points out here that America doesn’t typically elect the super-rich guy:
Before the Civil War, the parties (and especially the Democratic-Republicans) often nominated presidential candidates wealthy in land and slaves. George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Andrew Jackson, and John Tyler were some of the richest men of the young Republic. But since 1865, it has become unusual for parties to nominate very wealthy men. I can think of only five very rich post-1865 presidential nominees: John McCain, John Kerry, John F. Kennedy, Herbert Hoover and Samuel Tilden.
The rich are different than you and me. That’s what we’ve come to think. And the Republicans know this. And Jonathan Chait explains here how a Romney-Obama matchup would fuel a massive and scary debate about class:
The GOP Establishment’s deepest and most recurrent fear is an open debate over economic class. This is not a debate they feel they can win even among Republican voters, a majority of whom actually favor higher taxes on the rich. Romney’s assertion … that economic inequality should not be discussed, or should only be mentioned in “quiet rooms,” is a too-frank expression of the GOP elite’s actual belief that the issue must be kept out of political debate.
They’re worried, and they should be:
Romney’s wealth makes him one of the 3,140 wealthiest people in the country – that’s the richest 0.001 percent of Americans.
So William Galston argues here that Romney has to address his time at Bain Capital where he made a fortune swooping in and disassembling companies, directly and in detail:
His campaign is wrestling with (some reports suggest divided over) how best to respond. There’s an understandable reluctance to open up to public scrutiny the nearly one hundred deals in which he participated as the head of Bain Capital. But there’s really no choice. Romney has to present a counter-narrative, and he can’t do that without talking about individual cases. If he doesn’t release details on his own terms, they’ll dribble out anyway, prolonging the pain. And besides, in a public culture now suffused with anti-elite suspicion, a rich man running for president can’t just say “Trust me” – especially if the skills that enabled him to become rich are the heart of the case he’s making for replacing an incumbent president.
He says he created lots of jobs – trust him. But that won’t cut it, and see this dry comment from Rich Lowry:
In an ideal world, you would not pick a representative of this particular sector of the economy to be your presidential candidate.
No kidding! And the issue is best captured in a number of comments from Andrew Sullivan’s readers:
All of that money, all of those highly-paid advisors, years of preparation … and the best response that Mitt Romney’s team can come up with for one of our society’s biggest issues sounds like the words coming from a Jerry Springer guest being booed offstage: “Y’all are just jealous!”
Another writes this:
It wasn’t too long ago that Romney, in anticipation of the general, expressed his concern for the middle class and, explicitly, his lack of concern for the future prospects of the already-rich: “I’m not worried about rich people. They are doing just fine.” And now, in responding to Newt, he has taken the bait and full-throatedly claimed the mantle of defender of Wall Street. Not too savvy, and somewhat reminiscent of Obama’s “clinging to guns and religion” gaffe. It’s not a game-changer, as Obama’s error wasn’t, but it reinforces certain preconceived notions and makes the fires in the Democratic camp burn more brightly.
Another:
Mitt Romney’s fundamental electoral problem is that he comes off as a complete asshole. He’s got all the characteristic asshole qualities: a dismissive, contemptuous attitude towards rivals; lack of any evident feeling or empathy; a completely transparent willingness to say whatever voters want to hear in any given situation; arrogance; untrustworthiness; smarminess – you name it, he exudes it.
To a certain degree, I imagine nearly all politicians are assholes, but the successful ones find a way to deflect it. Obama is very good with self-depreciation. Dubya had a down home, “have a beer with him” demeanor. Clinton exuded warmth and interest. Romney just comes off like a prick in a suit and hasn’t found any way that I’ve seen to exhibit any self-awareness around this.
At a time in which people are angry and frustrated, this dude is wearing a “kick me” sign and doesn’t seem to know it. Can you imagine anyone thinking, “That Mitt Romney, he really cares about us”? That is why the Bain stuff is so devastating – it gives a form to this rather evident but hard to pin down quality about him: that he seems like just a total asshole.
That’s rather blunt. Fitzgerald just called them careless people – who smash things. But maybe that’s the same thing.
But Andrew Sullivan just watched that Bain documentary being broadcast throughout South Carolina by Newt Gingrich’s Super Pac and saw this:
It’s loaded with out-of-context quotes and heavily biased; it focuses on the specific human suffering of the necessary “creative destruction” of capitalism not its general benefits to the economy. It does so through the voices and stories of ordinary Americans. And, as an emotional bludgeon, it’s devastating.
But what makes it so dangerous to Romney, it seems to me, is that the Bain Brahmin didn’t just fire thousands of working class people in restructuring and in closing companies. He made a fucking unimaginable fortune doing it. That’s the issue. Other Republicans can speak about the need for free markets in a sluggish economy. But with Romney, we have a singular example of someone who made a quarter of a billion dollars by firing the white middle and working class in droves in ways that do not seem designed to promote growth or efficiency, but merely to enrich Bain.
The man is not Jay Gatsby:
Some of the associations in the ad are unfair – but they will resonate emotionally. Many, many people in, say, South Carolina, have lost jobs. That’s rough enough. But if Romney comes across as the man who made a fortune off this kind of Wall Street maneuvering, he becomes a symbol and a focus for all the roiling populist discontent out there. When he is responsible for someone losing her house, the contrast with his multiple mansions and private beach gets a little de trop. One ad with one victim could be poison.
Of all the jobs he liquidated, moreover, many are in the American heartland. And his response to the people in this documentary – white working class heartland Americans, the GOP base – is that they are merely envious of his achievements. They don’t come off that way in the ad – they come off as bewildered, betrayed and sure that Romney’s goal in all this was merely, solely to make money for himself – the kind of money that most Americans cannot even compute.
So this could be deadly:
I simply cannot imagine a worse narrative for a candidate in this climate; or a politician whose skills are singularly incapable of responding to the story in any persuasive way. This ad is powerful. Romney has already seen a drop in South Carolina. I suspect he’ll drop some more. And I suspect once the potency of this line of attack is absorbed by the GOP establishment, there will be some full, if concealed, panic.
The rich are different than you and me. They’re real bastards. And the Republicans are their party. Damn.
What can you say? Well, at salon.com Andrew Leonard looks at two columnists at the New York Times saying that Romney’s business experience as a private equity honcho tells us nothing about whether he’d be a good president, but for different reasons. And Leonard points out that Paul Krugman’s argument is simple:
A country is not a corporation. What might make sense for the corporate bottom line – for example, cutting costs by laying-off employees and outsourcing production to foreign countries – makes little sense for a nation. Krugman then moves into a familiar discussion of the downsides of austerity, a topic that, whether or not you agree with Keynesian economic policy, is at least relevant to the question at hand.
But David Brooks has a different take – as after he introduces the question, he drops any in-depth consideration of economic policy and business experience and offers this:
What the United States needs, suggests Brooks, isn’t a CEO. We need an aristocrat. First, successful presidents tend to be emotionally secure. They have none of the social resentments and desperate needs that plagued men like Richard Nixon. Instead they were raised, often in an aristocratic family, with a sense that they were the natural leaders of the nation. They were infused, often at an elite prep school, with a sense of obligation and responsibility to perform public service.
Whether it is a George Washington, a Franklin or Theodore Roosevelt or a John F. Kennedy, this sort of president enters the White House with ease and confidence, is relatively unscathed by the criticism of the crowd, is able to separate the mask he must wear for public display from the real honest self he knows himself to be.
The rich are different than you and me, but in a good way, and Leonard is amused:
With this column, Brooks settles, once and for all, the question of whether he himself is an elitist. And not just any run-of-the-mill elitist! No, Brooks is a heroic, truth-telling elitist, with the courage to say what conventional wisdom about American discourse declares verboten!
Brooks:
In sum, great presidents are often aristocrats and experienced political insiders. They experience great setbacks. They feel the presence of God’s hand on their every move.
Unfortunately, we’re not allowed to talk about these things openly these days. We disdain elitism, political experience and explicit God-talk. Great failure is considered “baggage” in today’s campaign lingo.
Leonard:
I wonder, why might Americans disdain elitism? Could it have something to do with our history, our defining identity as a people who rebelled against monarchy? Could it be that one of our core values, at least until recently, is the idea that anyone, no matter what family they were born into, or how wealthy they are, or what prep school they attended, has (at least theoretically) the potential and opportunity to rise to the highest office in the land?
Brooks doesn’t weigh in on whether Romney qualifies as a true blue-blooded aristocrat – although, given the fact that his father was a governor and car company CEO, the implication is obvious. What’s equally obvious, however, is the slam at Obama, who was raised by a single mother and enjoyed none of the advantages that were mother’s milk to Romney.
Who is more emotionally secure? Who can best withstand the “brutal” (Brooks’ word) attacks that are now being directed at Romney and have been hammering on Obama for more than three years.
This is like listening to Hemingway mock Fitzgerald. And Brooks is Fitzgerald of course – besotted by the awesome rich. The question is whether that view is widely shared.
Of course another way to look at this comes from Gary Weiss with Romney and the Pathology of Bain – arguing that the private equity business appeals to personalities lacking in conscience and empathy:
Here’s one of the better brief digests of Romney as a corporate job-destroyer, written by Josh Kosman, who wrote an excellent book in 2010 on the buyout industry called “The Buyout of America: How Private Equity Is Destroying Jobs and Killing the American Economy.” This book is required reading for anybody who wants to understand what Romney did for a living at Bain. He is the living embodiment of how the “job creator” Republican meme is grotesquely misleading, if not an outright lie.
You can’t really blame him. It was his job. … Romney was taught at Harvard Business School that the purpose of a corporation is not to “create jobs” but to create profits for its owners by, among other things, keeping the cost of labor at an absolute minimum. Job creation, if any, is incidental and entirely expendable, sort of the way oil-drilling rigs burn off natural gas. If profits are to be enhanced by job destruction so much the better.
After all, jobs sometimes mean unions, to be fought at any cost, and benefits, especially medical benefits, that are a drain on corporate profits. Jobs, in other words, are a pain in the butt. A corporation’s only real purpose is to enrich its owners, who are either a small group of suits (as at Romney’s Bain Capital) or thousands of shareholders, by keeping the labor force neat and trim and nonunion.
Buyout firms embody this job-destruction principle to the max. They are almost a self-parody, which explains why fictional moguls like Gordon Gekko tend to be buyout guys. They are the “barbarians at the gate.” Their purpose is to leverage the companies they buy to the hilt, so as to extract the maximum profit. Bain was notorious for doing so in a manner that was guaranteed to destroy jobs. Romney and his partners walked away with profits taxed at subpar capital-gains rates, thanks to the “carried interest” deduction that is a sacred cow to private equity and hedge fund managers.
And there are specific examples:
Among the companies acquired and plundered by Bain that eventually went bankrupt were Stage Stores, American Pad & Paper, GS Industries and Details. The job slaughter at American Pad became a campaign issue when Romney ran against Ted Kennedy in 1994. Bain and its partners, including Romney, made a fortune on each of these companies. There were other Bain companies that did nicely – Romney likes to point to Staples – but it’s ludicrous to give Bain credit for Staples prospering after it recovered from its assault on the company. That’s like thanking a virus for not turning into pneumonia.
Romney sees absolutely nothing wrong in the trail of destruction that he left behind him, and in his victory speech Tuesday night he criticized his Republican opponents – hypocrites though they definitely were, but accurate hypocrites – for putting “free enterprise on trial.” That’s typical. A sociopath is a person who “lacks a sense of moral responsibility or social conscience.”
So with Bain we’re talking about careless people – “they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together and let other people clean up the mess they had made.” Someone ought to write a book about that. But someone did.
And Weiss ends with this comment on our all-American rich sociopaths:
The American people historically aren’t very fussy about the inner demons of the persons they elect to office, and proved that in 1972 when they turned out in vast numbers to re-elect Richard Nixon. Romney stands a reasonable chance of winning the presidency in 2012, and with a program that makes Nixon look like a big-government bleeding heart by comparison.
Yes, Scott, the rich are different than you and me. God help us.
