Ezra Klein is in Cleveland at a conference filled with corporate CEOs. He reports back:
Business types really hate Barack Obama. Everybody sort of knows that, but it’s hard to get a sense of it if you’re not in the room listening to them laugh bitterly at questions like, “Does Obama understand the damage regulations are doing to business?”
….These folks really, really feel persecuted and unappreciated. The common response to this, of course, is that corporate profits have hit record levels in recent years and the
top 1 percent has never been richer. But if you need more evidence that money doesn’t buy happiness, you should sit with some CEOs for an hour.
The fact that lots of blue-collar workers gave up on Democrats long ago and now vote mostly on cultural issues has been the subject of dozens of books and magazine articles. It’s even easy to understand: In FDR’s day, Democrats really did do a lot for these kinds of workers. Today, Democrats don’t really do that much at all for them. So why shouldn’t they just forget about economic issues and vote for the pro-gun guy?
Corporate CEOs are a different story. For decades, Republicans were the pro-business party and it made sense for business executives to vote for them. But what about now? Republicans are formally dedicated to blocking anything that might even remotely have a chance of improving the economy and thereby improve business prospects as well. And yet, CEOs show no sign of wavering loyalties. Just the opposite: they’ve largely bought the austerity/regulation/deficit fable hook, line, and sinker even though it makes not the slightest sense.
There’s nothing really new about that, I guess, but it’s still sort of freshly gobsmacking every time I see it in action. These are, supposedly, some of the smartest folks in the country. But they don’t have a clue. You can’t even say they’re slaves of some particular defunct economist, as Keynes suggested. They’re just slaves of folk economics at its folksiest and most vacuous — and most damaging. And they have every intention of taking the rest of us down with them.
