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A few weeks back I participated in a post-election roundtable that included Peter Hart and former Nixon aide David Gergen. The session got unexpectedly hot, in particular over the whole issue of whether or not Obama had done enough to keep America’s CEOs happy. Gergen kept pressing this idea that, even though finance-industry bonuses are back up to record highs at the same time that real human beings are facing horrific unemployment and foreclosure crises, Obama needed to work harder at jacking off the CEO class. When I got genuinely emotional in response to this idea, Gergen continually expressed not so much anger as surprise. He made some cryptic comments (which didn’t appear in the printed transcript) that included one exchange in which he suggested that he didn’t expect to hear this sort of thing from me, among other things because my opinions clashed with something that had recently appeared in my own “newspaper.
