Dan

Calabrese

Read Dan's bio and previous columns here

March 19, 2009

AIG’s Bonuses and Obama’s Executive Incompetence

Presidential leadership, now that we’ve entered the age of hope and change, can now be defined as the eloquent expression of righteous indignation. Action – well, that’s another matter entirely.

AIG, the bailed-out and much-loathed insurer, is catching it from all corners for paying retention bonuses to an assortment of employees – all of whom were guaranteed to receive the bonuses by virtue of agreements made before former Allstate CEO Edward Liddy took the helm of AIG at the government’s request.

The bonuses range from as little as $1,000 to as much as $6.5 million. Retention bonuses, while they may be falling out of favor now, are hardly unheard of in the business world. When they help you hang onto people who are crucial to your success, they seem like a great idea. When you end up paying them out even as you’re bleeding cash left and right, you feel like an idiot for having offered them in the first place.

But as Liddy tried to explain to preening, indignant members of Congress (including Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, who said that AIG executives should commit suicide), honoring contracts is at the heart of what insurance companies do.

At any rate, the AIG bonuses provide the perfect opportunity for President Obama to express his outrage.

In announcing that his administration will attempt to stop the bonuses from being paid, the president said, “All across the country, there are people who work hard and meet their responsibilities every day, without the benefit of government bailouts or multimillion-dollar bonuses. And all they ask is that everyone, from Main Street to Wall Street to Washington, play by the same rules. This isn't just a matter of dollars and cents. It's about our fundamental values."

OK. So now we know that the president will not stand for what he knows isn’t right, regardless of the fact that the applicable outrage may be the result of a deal that’s already set in stone. Got it.

Oops. Small problem.

Just two weeks ago, Congress handed the president a $410 billion omnibus spending bill that was loaded up with pork-barrel earmarks – the very kind of spending Obama pledged during the campaign he would not permit.

So, given the president’s stated intolerance for outrages – even those of a pre-existing nature – he would surely send the bill back to Congress listing his objections, and instructing them to take out the pork before sending it back to them. Right?

Uh, no.

"I am signing an imperfect omnibus bill because it is necessary for the ongoing functions of government," Obama said. "But I also view this as a departure point for more far-reaching change.”

What?

White House press secretary Robert Gibbs helpfully explained that the spending bill was “old business” – in other words, it was put together last year on George W. Bush’s watch – and Obama just wanted to get it done and move forward.

The easy charge to make here is hypocrisy, but every president is hypocritical on certain matters (so is every person on one level or another), and in truth there is something more troubling than hypocrisy to consider here: Does Obama have the slightest idea how to make an executive decision – and what constitutes a good one or a bad one?

Obama declared that the government needed to act to counteract the recession, but he let Congress decide the structure of his massive $787 billion “stimulus” package, and simply signed on to their work of porky art. He pledged during the campaign that he would “go line by line” through the budget, eliminating things that make no sense, but given the first opportunity to do so, he punted and announced he would come up with a plan later. He constantly declares that we can’t keep spending beyond our means, but is pushing hard for the first-ever federal budget in which the deficit approaches half the entire amount to be spent.

There is no rhyme or reason to any of this. No matter the priority, he makes grand pronouncements and punts on the actual action. Let an easy target in the private sector do something he can effectively denounce, Obama will find his way to the nearest teleprompter and wax rhapsodic. No one does righteous indignation better. But Obama the brilliant orator can’t help Obama the incompetent executive to practice what he preaches, because the preaching is all he’s got.

© 2009 North Star Writers Group. May not be republished without permission.

This is Column # DC264. Request permission to publish here.