According to the Wall Street Journal, the tab for the weeklong extravaganza came to $2.1 million. Investigators are still trying to establish whether Tyco paid half of it. Then there was the gold-and-burgundy floral-patterned shower curtain costing $6,000 that the couple installed in their New York apartment at company expense. A $6,000 shower curtain is so over-the-top that it makes the $600 toilet seat that symbolized Pentagon excess in the 1980’s seem almost reasonable, even after adjusting for inflation.
The more I learn about Kozlowski and where he came from, the angrier I get.
As the child of immigrants who grew up in Queens, I recognized Kozlowski as a kindred spirit and realized my anger was fueled by a feeling that he had betrayed his class–my class. According to the Journal, he grew up with his distinctly Polish surname in a working-class neighborhood in Newark, N.J., the son of a police detective.
He attended Seton Hall University in South Orange, N.J., a respectable institution but not one with a name that conveys a lot of status. There were a lot of Kozlowskis in my old neighborhood, bright kids with street smarts who could make it wherever they went. The best of them never forgot where they came from. That’s what infuriates me about Kozlowski; he was somebody I could have sat next to at P.S. 152. He wasn’t born with a sense of entitlement; he adopted it in the most brash and boorish way, pillaging the shareholders like a conquering army with no regard for human decency.
If I can get this worked up over one rotten CEO, imagine the anger of the voters who have lost money at the hands of the executives of Tyco, WorldCom, Enron, Adelphia and all the other malefactors who have destroyed their companies and driven down the stock market. Not since 1934, when the Securities and Exchange Commission was first created in the wake of Black Tuesday, has there been such a strong case for public protections against big business.
Admittedly, some Democrats were complicit in the deregulatory euphoria that allowed Corporate America to run amuck. But the excesses of Corporate America are largely a Republican problem, just as the excesses of the welfare state have traditionally been tied to the Democratic party.
So why are the Democrats having such a hard time getting their act together? Instead of taking on the Republicans, they’re arguing among themselves about what constitutes class war and whether populist themes will work. Democratic pollster Mark Penn, who helped engineer President Clinton’s reelection after the 1994 debacle where Democrats lost both houses of Congress, is convinced that class-warfare language is a loser even though it tests well in conventional polls. To convince Clinton to remove it from his rhetoric, Penn once made two advertising spots and proved that the one without the class-war language did better with voters. When I asked him to illustrate the point, he said the class-war spot accused the Republicans of wanting to cut Medicare “so they can cut taxes for the wealthy.” As a result of Penn’s testing, they changed the language to: “The Republicans want to cut Medicare. They don’t like the program; they never did.” “And that’s the difference between 50 percent agreeing with you and 80 percent agreeing with you,” says Penn.
That doesn’t sound like such a major adjustment to me, and if Penn’s right, staying away from class warfare could help the Democrats expand their appeal to higher-income voters. “Right now the opportunity is pretty good to say that if you didn’t have Democrats in office, what kind of bill do you think you would have gotten on corporate responsibility?” says Penn. Without pressure from Democrats, Republicans would have punted. “You would have had no TV for a week for CEOs,” he says. Still, the message has to be delivered with subtlety. The CEOs are a big fat target now, but Penn warns against going after them in such a way that’s principally an appeal to lower-income voters. Politics is inevitably about us versus them, and the pool of us, namely shareholders, has never been larger with 60 percent of Americans invested in the stock market.
Al Gore snubbed probusiness Democrats when he stayed away from their gathering in New York last month, and he says he is sticking with his “people versus the powerful” campaign rhetoric. Sen. Joseph Lieberman, Gore’s running mate in 2000, was never comfortable with the language and said so many times during the campaign. Lieberman made news at the New York convention when he repeated his criticism to reporters. The senator has his own problems with credibility as a recipient of Enron money and as a leading opponent of accounting reform during the Clinton administration.
Gore is almost certain to run in 2004, and the string of corporate scandals pitting the people against the powerful entitles him to say, “I told you so.” What he lacks is subtlety. Gore is all one way or the other. He’s on or off; there’s no middle range. Where Clinton was all nuance, Gore has none. One highly placed aide in the Gore campaign recalls how “he disowned us the day after like it’s our fault. He blamed Clinton. He’s blamed so many folks. It’s not the characteristic of a good leader.” The puzzling thing is that Gore recently said that after 18 months of soul-searching, he was ready to “let it rip.” This new Gore would be the real thing–as opposed to the Gore we saw in the 2000 campaign, who was the product of his consultants. Now he’s defending his campaign rhetoric, which presumably was devised, written and tested by his consultants. So which is it?
