Dan

Calabrese

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October 27, 2008

Hey Sen. Obama: I am Joe the CEO, And You Don’t Know Me

Never mind William Ayers. Barack Obama believes he has caught John McCain in a much more damning entanglement:

“He’s in cahoots with Joe the CEO.”

Eek. What could be worse than that?

Clearly not happy with the emergence of Joe the Plumber on the scene, Obama told supporters at a rally last week that McCain is only pretending to care about the interests of Joe and those of his ilk. Obamatons cheered in derision when their hero uttered the following blather:

“Joe’s cool, I got no problems with Joe. All I want to do is give Joe a tax cut. But let’s be clear who John McCain’s fighting for. He’s not fighting for Joe the Plumber, he’s fighting for Joe the Hedge Fund Manager. John McCain likes to talk about Joe the Plumber but he’s in cahoots with Joe the CEO.”

Let’s talk about Joe the CEO. Obama doesn’t know as much about him as he thinks he does. First, it’s been estimated that there are five million Americans with the title of CEO. As it happens, I’m one of them. My business has experienced many twists and turns and dips and dives over the course of nine years, and I am very far from rich. But during those years I’ve paid out a lot in payroll, in taxes, in equipment rentals, in office rent – did I mention taxes? – and in health insurance premiums for employees as well as myself.

I’ve taken in a lot, and I’ve spent pretty much all of it on the aforementioned items. During most of the years our company has been in business, we made more than $250,000. That would have qualified me as rich according to Obama’s concept of America. That is a joke. The more money we were making, the more people and things we needed to sustain the business at the level to which it had grown. If we thought we were on a revenue-growth trajectory, and we made investments to reflect that, we had to pray we hadn’t guessed wrong or we would be in trouble.

All of this is fine, by the way. It’s life in the big city for a CEO. I could have abandoned it any time I wanted and gone out and gotten a job working for someone else. I haven’t and I won’t. I may yet realize fabulous rewards for all this hard work, but I know there’s a chance I won’t, and I’m OK with that.

Now if I were to approach Barack Obama on a rope line with this story, I am sure he would tell me that he doesn’t mean CEOs like me. He would explain that he is talking about the evil CEOs, the ones who earn hundreds of millions in salaries, bonuses and stock options.

But here’s the problem with that. Those CEOs are creating far more wealth, far more jobs and far more value – and paying far more in taxes – than I ever will. True, some idiot boards of directors reward CEOs who don’t perform with bonuses and “golden parachutes,” but that is not Obama’s concern, nor is it mine. Those board members are shareholders of the companies who give such ill-conceived rewards to their undeserving chief executives. They are wasting their own money – not yours and not mine. If they want to keep doing that, and their fellow shareholders want to keep electing them to those boards, that’s their problem.

The general rule in business is that CEOs get rich only after they create successful businesses that provide a good living for a great many people. Whether they are owners, partners or hired guns, their compensation reflects their achievement.

Obama likes to tell people he is “not concerned about CEOs” – he put it in a commercial – either because he thinks the public is ignorant about what it means to be a CEO, or, more likely in my view, Obama himself is completely ignorant about this. This is a guy who’s been going around insisting that we have to “reward work instead of rewarding wealth,” which is like saying we need more eating and less food.

But perhaps the greatest evidence that Obama has no idea how the creation of wealth works is this statement: “I do want to roll back the Bush tax cuts for people like me, I don’t need a tax cut.”

Ooh, look at the big salary on Barack.

If Obama doesn’t “need” a tax cut, that’s because he doesn’t do anything with his income to create additional wealth. He doesn’t create jobs. He doesn’t make a product. He is an elected official, and there’s nothing wrong with that, but it’s not a job in which you use your own resources to create wealth. Obama knows nothing about this. He is under the impression that “Joe the CEO” does nothing but collect and count his money.

Maybe that’s what Obama does with his fat paycheck. But I can assure you that Joe the CEO works his butt off for that money, and doesn’t get to keep much of it until he’s paid a lot of salaries, bills, health insurance premiums and taxes.

I am Joe the CEO. And I think I’m going to vote for John McCain, because I would like a president who is in cahoots with me.

© 2008 North Star Writers Group. May not be republished without permission.

This is Column # DC218. Request permission to publish here.