Text A The President as Corporate Salesman
The president of the United States, we learn in school, plays many roles: chief executive, commander-in-chief, chief legislator, head of state, and party leader. Seldom mentioned is this role as guardian and representative of corporate America.
Presidents do their share to make the public accept the corporate business ideology. Every modern president has had occasion to praise the "free-market system" and denounce collectivist alternatives. Presidents are solid believers of a market-driven economy. They boost the virtues of self-reliant competition and private initiative, virtues that exist more clearly in their minds than in the actual practices of the business community.
The president is the top salesman of the system. They would have us believe that our social problems and economic difficulties can be solved with enough "vigor" and "resolve," or through "self-reliance" or a "spiritual revival," as various White House occupants from Kennedy to Clinton have put it.
"America is number one," declared President Nixon, while millions of his unemployed compatriots were feeling less than that. "America is standing tall. America is the greatest," exulted President Reagan to a nation with sixty million citizens living below or close to the poverty level, a record trade deficit, and a runaway national debt. Prosperity, our presidents tell us, is here or not far off — but so are the nation's many wild-eyed enemies, be they communists, revolutionaries, or terrorists. Presidents usually downplay crises relating to the economy and emphasize the ones needed to justify U.S. interventionism abroad, huge military budgets, and curbs on political dissent.
Whether Democrat or Republican, liberal or conservative, the president tends to treat capitalist interests as synonymous with the nation's well-being. Presidents greet the accumulation of wealth as a manifestation of a healthy national economy, regardless of how that wealth is distributed or applied. America will achieve new heights spurred on "by freedom and the profit motive," President Reagan announced. "This is a free-enterprise country," said President Clinton, who added: "I want to create more millionaires in my presidency than Bush and Quayle did." Presidents will describe the overseas investments of giant corporations as "U.S. interests" abroad, to be defended at all costs — or certainly at great cost to the U.S. populace. In fact, a president's primary commitment abroad is not to democracy as such but to the global "free market."
In the past century, almost all Republican and Democratic presidential candidates have been millionaires whether at the time they first campaigned for the office or by the time they departed from it. In addition, presidents have drawn their top advisers and administrators primarily from industry and banking and have relied heavily on the judgements of corporate leaders.
A president's life style does not make it any easier for him to develop an acute awareness of the hard life endured by ordinary working people. He lives like a king in a rent-free, 132-room mansion known as the While House, set on an 18-acre estate, with a domestic staff of about one hundred, including six butlers and five full-time florists, a well-stocked wine cellar, tennis courts, a private movie room, a gymnasium, a bowling alley, and a heated outdoors swimming pool. The president had the free services of a private physician, a dozen chauffeured limousines, numerous helicopters and jets, including Air Force One. He also has access to the imperial luxuries of Camp David and other country retreats, free vacations, a huge expense allowance and — for the few things he must pay for — a generous annual salary.
Journalists and political scientists have described the presidency as a "man-killing job." Yet presidents take more vacations and live far better and longer than the average American male. After leaving office they continue to feed from the public trough. Four ex-presidents (Ford, Carter, Reagan, and Bush) are multimillionaires, yet each receives from $500,000 to $700,000 in annual pensions, office space, staff, and travel expenses, along with full-time Secret Service protection costing millions of dollars a year.
Presidents and presidential candidates regularly evade federal limits on campaign spending through a loophole that allows big contributors to give what is called "soft money" directly to state political parties. Big contributors may deny any intention of trying to buy influence, but if it should happen that after the election they find themselves or their corporations burdened by a problem, they see no reason why they shouldn't be allowed to exercise their rights like other citizens and ask their friend, the president of the United States, for a little help.
For their part, presidents seem as capable of trading favors for campaign money as any influence-peddling, special-interest politician — only on a grander scale. The Nixon administration helped settle a multibillion-dollar suit against ITT and received $400,000 from that corporation. Reagan pushed through the deregulation of oil and gasoline prices and received huge contributions from the oil companies. President Bush's "Team 100" consisted of 249 wealthy financiers and corporate CEOs who put up at least $100,000 each to help elect Bush in 1988. In return, they enjoyed White House handouts, special favors on regulatory and legal matters, and appointments to choice ambassadorships.
It is said that the greatness of the presidential office lends greatness to its occupant, so that even persons of mediocre endowment grow from handling presidential responsibilities and powers. Closer examination reveals that presidents have been just as readily corrupted as ennobled by high office, inclined toward self-righteous assertion, compelled to demonstrate their military "toughness" against weaker nations, and not above operating in unlawful ways. Thus, long before Bill Clinton thought of doing it, at least six other presidents employed illegal FBI wiretaps to gather incriminating information on rival political figures.
The White House tapes, which recorded the private Oval Office conversations of President Nixon, showed him to be a petty, vindictive, bigoted man who manifested a shallowness of spirit and mind that the majestic office could cloak but not transform. President Reagan repeatedly made up stories about nonexistent events. The Iran-contra affair revealed him to be a deceptive manipulator who pretended to support one policy while pursuing another and who felt himself to be unaccountable to Congress and the Constitution.
To get to the top of the political power heap the president must present himself as a "man of the people" while quietly serving those who control the wealth and power of the country in ways that are pleasing to them. If presidents tend to speak one way and act another, it is due less to some inborn flaw shared by the various personalities who occupy the office than to the nature of the office itself. Like any officeholder, the president plays a dual role in that he must satisfy the major interests of corporate America and high finance and at the same time make a show of serving the public.
Although some presidents may try, they discover they cannot belong to both the big corporations and the people. The success any group enjoys in winning presidential support has less to do with the justice of its cause than with the place it occupies within the class structure. Presidents usually decide in favor of big industry and finance and against light industry and small business, in favor of corporate shareholders and against workers.
On infrequent occasions the president may oppose the interests of individual companies. Hence, he might do battle with an industry like steel, as did Kennedy, to hold prices down in order to ease the inflationary pressure on other producer interests. When engaged in such conflicts the president takes on an appearance of opposing the special interests on behalf of the common interest. In fact, he might better be described as protecting the common interest of the special interests.
On even more infrequent occasions when an issue is given some honest exposure in the media and public sentiment is mobilized, the president might decide on behalf of the public interest, as when Clinton backed his Food and Drug commissioner against the tobacco companies regarding the marketing of nicotine. Still for all the publicity, not all that much has been done to stop that industry from marketing its addictive and injurious products to publics at home and abroad.
Generally, as the most powerful officeholder in the land, the president is more readily available to the most powerful interests in the land and rather inaccessible to us lesser mortals — unless we organize and raise more hell. The best thing we can do is never romanticize the individuals who occupy the highest office or, for that matter, any office. |