THE GOLDEN GOOSE

One of the problems with running a campaign for President promising to kill the Golden Goose is that in this case the goose can read. Elizabeth Warren is climbing up the polls in the race to be the DNC nominee by promising to stick it to big business. That would, of course, be the same big business that supported her during her run for the Senate. Big business is used to Democrats saying this; they just realize they have zero plans on actually doing this. But, in this case, Warren appears to plan on keeping these insane promises.

There are always private meetings between business executives and candidates for high office. I have actually been directly involved in some of these meetings. I will not mention names, to protect the non-innocent. A Democrat, running for the United States Senate from California, asked for a meeting with our company president. I was asked, by our president, to sit in on the meeting. This person was asking for contributions and was explaining the reasons we should provide support.

I did not say anything during the meeting. When it was over, the president asked me two questions. He asked me what I thought were the chances of this candidate succeeding. I said close to zero, because the opponent was very strong with much higher name recognition. He then said: if this candidate wins, how that will impact us. I said that I had personal interaction with this individual and felt that we would be treated fairly. Ultimately, we provided some support, but did not go all in on a candidate we didn’t expect to win. We were right by the way; the candidate did not win the DNC nomination.

The point is that virtually every CEO and/or Board of any major corporation will ask similar questions. What is the chance of this person winning? How will that impact us? In the case of Elizabeth Warren the answer to the first question is that she is very unlikely to beat Donald Trump. The answer to the second question is that if she wins and she keeps her campaign promises it will be a financial disaster for the entire American economy and that will affect everyone.

While Democrats like to pretend that big business supports Republicans and vice versa, the truth is that big business doesn’t care much about political parties. Regardless of which party wins, the people in power are going to be calling with their hand out and explaining how they can help. That is why major business owners, like Bill Gates and Warren Buffett support Democrats who make promises that would be devastating for their operations. They know this will never happen and that they will always have a seat at the table. But Elizabeth Warren is promising to deny big business a seat at the table and if they believe her the impact will be significant.

They will not make major expenditures on someone they believe is seriously out to hurt them. They may even spend a lot of money making sure that does not happen. The average person will not even know this is happening. Really big business has relationships with everyone that matters, including lobbyists and the main stream media. This would be subtle. A top executive at a network would be told that a story about the real impact of the proposals by Elizabeth Warren seems like a good topic. Since this would come from someone who spends millions in advertising, this advice would not be ignored.

No one should underestimate this. One does not have to be a fan of big business to win the Presidency, but it is extremely dangerous to run as an enemy of big business. The last President to do that was Theodore Roosevelt, but he didn’t exactly win an election running against big business. That election was won by William McKinley, who was much more attractive to business tycoons. Roosevelt became President when McKinley was assassinated. Then and only then did he take on the “Trust Busters.” What happened is that in 1890 congress passed the Sherman Anti-Trust Act. No one took that serious and for the first 12 years U.S. courts routinely sided with business. That all changed when Roosevelt realized that he had a sympathetic Supreme Court so he took on the biggest of them all, J.Pierpont Morgan. Morgan was shocked and furious. He demanded a meeting with Roosevelt who told him the lawsuit would continue and the courts would decide. The Supreme Court ruled in favor of Roosevelt in a 5-4 decision.

After he did this, Roosevelt became very popular and easily won re-election. But, it might have been a very different story if he had tried to run the first time on this type of platform. During the time of Roosevelt, tremendous power was held by a very few people. Today, there are many very powerful companies and none of them has close to the power of a J. Pierpont Morgan. But they do have the same mindset. They will support almost anything, as long as they realize these are false promises. But if they start believing someone is serious about taxing wealth and destroying what she calls the free ride for billionaires, they won’t risk seeing her get elected. This is one reason that the only person likely to lose to Donald Trump in a general election by a larger margin than Joe Biden is Elizabeth Warren.

Smart Democrats know this, but the current Democratic Party is not run by these people. The current leadership is coming from people like AOC, who can’t even spell economics and has no clue with regard to how the world really works. It looks more and more like Democrats have developed their own perfect storm destined to leave an unbelievable amount of damage before it moves out to sea. If they set sail for the election on the U.S.S. Elizabeth Warren the results are likely to be catastrophic.

A side note. I was once asked by our company president, to attend a luncheon meeting with a very powerful United States Senator. This is a name you would all recognize. This meeting was set up by a major Democratic donor. I was positioned at the table, right next to this Senator, so we could have a one on one private conversation. He was proposing a universal health care plan that we thought would be devastating for our company. I was asked to explain exactly how this would impact us and to encourage him to make changes. He was extremely arrogant and considered himself the ultimate expert on the subject. I was actually stunned to realize that he had no clue with regard to how this worked in the real world. I can’t pretend that he agreed with anything I said, but I can confirm that he did modify his proposal when he became aware of the strong opposition to it.

TDM