The US is probably in for trouble over the next three years. President Obama hasn’t had the normal American exposure to the private sector — his cabinet choices show that clearly. In reflecting on our own experiences, we realize how important it is to have worked in the private sector in order to understand this country. It may not be exactly true anymore that the business of America is business, but someone who has virtually never worked in the real world would understandably views America through a very different prism, foreign to many Americans, but congenial to many in the media and the universities. Like you and most Americans, we started work in lousy jobs as a teenager:

In 1968 we received our first promotion, from rear-window man to front-window man at Steve’s Auto-Magic Car Wash, a happy event. The front-window man got more tips, and there was pretty much nothing worse than doing the windows in the back of a Ford LTD police K-9 station wagon. A couple of years before that we got fired for the first time, for lousy dishwashing at 2:30am at the Lobster House Marina. Diners had reason to cheer the excellent judgment of the proprietor of that restaurant.

Since then we’ve done all sorts of things: teaching math to middle school students, commercial and investment banking, buying, selling and running companies, suing and getting sued, doing well and doing poorly, a reasonably full range of experiences in the private sector. We’ve also worked for the government, student summer jobs like clerk-typist for the US Navy and the sweetest job of all: mailman. There’s little more exhilarating than being sent out at 8:30 in the morning with a can of doggie-pepper-spray, the special key that opens all the large mailboxes in the land, and the admonition never to come back before 3:30, even if (especially if) we completed our rounds two hours earlier.

Our experiences may or may not be typical, but most everyone has their war stories if they’ve lived long enough. As the man said, example is the school of mankind and he will learn at no other; experience is the best teacher.

But what do you do if you are 48 years old and have practically zero experience in business (except for one little job that you apparently fibbed about)? What do you do if you have no experience in the private sector and unemployment is around 20% for the critical cohort of 25-54 year old men — and yet you have been entrusted with the power and responsibility to make key judgments about how to fix this? Where would you go to learn? Whose judgment would you rely on? How would you know the difference between good advice and bad advice?

But there’s even a more fundamental problem than that. What if you have had such a casual relationship with facts and figures that you have no problem spouting economic gibberish with conviction? What if you have such a casual relationship with the truth that even your most ardent supporters are fed up with you and getting increasingly public about saying so? As Roger Simon said without excessive exaggeration about President Obama: “Nobody believes anything he says anymore.”

President Obama’s decision to go after the banks after his loss at the hands of Scott Brown showed both poor political and policy judgment — beating up on the private sector is hardly the way to get the private sector revved up and creating jobs. (BTW, we’re not opposed to financial regulatory reform, but Obama didn’t stop with that and instead stressed punitive measures for banks — he just sounds so tiresome and retro in that faux-populism of his, like he’s giving a speech to the IWW in 1917 or something.)

Even if President Obama had a world of experience and excellent judgment, the next few years would provide daunting challenges for the private American economy and our perilous public finances. That his working experience in the American economy is practically nil, and his instincts are counterproductive, do not bode well for a robust economic recovery. (And we haven’t even begun to address the inept foreign policy underlying that stunning loss of Massachusetts.) We wish there were a happy way out of this, but that seems a vain hope at the moment.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 25th, 2010 at 4:55 am and is filed under business, Democrats, General, Republicans, War. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.