Democrats Face a Juggling Act Over Economy Message - New York Times

Democrats Face a Juggling Act Over Economy Message - New York Times

By JACKIE CALMES

Published: September 7, 2012

CHARLOTTE, N.C. â€" With both parties’ conventions now concluded, what is clear is that each played to type â€" Republicans as the party of business, Democrats of the worker. For President Obama, however, the week here captured his tricky balancing act: a four-year struggle to show that pro-worker does not mean antibusiness.

The Democrats’ three-day program, and Mr. Obama’s climactic nomination acceptance speech on Thursday, included standard slams at oil and insurance companies, but far fewer knocks at private equity firms like Mitt Romney’s Bain Capital than the Obama campaign and its allies were lobbing just a few months ago.

The challenge for the campaign was to counter Republican attacks at their Tampa, Fla., convention depicting Mr. Obama as the enemy of job creators when unemployment persists, while energizing his liberal base in the convention hall and beyond. The delicate juggling was most evident on Wednesday, during the brief daily window of network television coverage.

To the chagrin of moderate Democrats, a prime-time speaker was Elizabeth Warren, the liberal scourge of Wall Street who is running in Massachusetts to unseat Senator Scott P. Brown, a Republican. Her scheduling slot reflected Democrats’ zeal to capture that seat and protect their slim Senate majority.

“The system is rigged,” Ms. Warren shouted to a receptive crowd. (While she spoke, television showed Michelle Obama chatting with Julián Castro, the mayor of San Antonio and the convention keynote speaker.)

“Look around,” Ms. Warren said. “Oil companies guzzle down billions in profits. Billionaires pay lower tax rates than their secretaries. And Wall Street C.E.O.’s â€" the same ones who wrecked our economy and destroyed millions of jobs â€" still strut around Congress, no shame, demanding favors and acting like we should thank them.”

But as the schedulers arranged, she followed James D. Sinegal, the well-known co-founder of Costco. He was among several speakers from the business world chosen to affirm Mr. Obama’s philosophy that the private sector needs the hand of government to educate a work force, build roads, finance research and more. That sought to counter a Republican convention theme, based on an Obama quote taken out of context, that the president recently said of businesses, “you didn’t build that.”

“Some of my friends in corporate America say that they need a government that gets off the backs of businesses,” Mr. Sinegal said. “And that’s why many of them are supporting the opposition with donations of hundreds of thousands of dollars.”

“But I think they’ve got it all wrong,” he continued. “Business needs a president who has covered the backs of businesses, a president who understands what the private sector needs to succeed.”

Wednesday night’s other speakers included Ms. Warren’s like-minded Democrats, the A.F.L.-C.I.O. president, Richard L. Trumka, and Bob King, president of the United Auto Workers. But the hours before prime time also featured the billionaire investor Tom Steyer, who introduced himself, with a hint of defensiveness, as “a businessman, a professional investor and a proud Democrat”; Gov. Jack Markell of Delaware, a self-described “card-carrying capitalist” who helped found Nextel; Austin Ligon, a founder and former chief executive of CarMax; and a small-business man from swing state Virginia, Bill Butcher.

“If you listened only to Elizabeth Warren, the message was catastrophically antibusiness,” said Matt Bennett, co-founder of Third Way, a centrist Democratic group. That “further drives a wedge between business and Democrats that may not be fair but is the way business perceives things,” he said. “And making voters into victims is not a winning strategy.

“As Bill Clinton used to say, you can’t love the jobs and hate the job creators,” said Mr. Bennett, who worked in the Clinton administration.

Mr. Obama’s speech, like Mr. Clinton’s the night before, he said, “hit the perfect balance: no victimization of the American middle class or excessive attacks on American business. Instead, he kept the focus on growth, shared prosperity and citizenship.”

But it was Mr. Obama’s talk in past years, more than his policies, that alienated many on Wall Street and in big business, corporate representatives continue to say, like calling auto-company bondholders “speculators” and bankers “fat cats.”

“There is a feeling that the administration does not understand business, and it’s not so much that they’re antibusiness, it’s that their intuitions are all wrong,” said one corporate representative here, who like others asked not to be identified in criticizing Mr. Obama. “It’s like taking someone who’s grown up and spent their whole life on the Upper East Side and put them in charge of farm policy.”

Senator Charles E. Schumer, a New York Democrat whose constituency includes many who work on Wall Street, said he tells businesspeople, including those he saw at the convention, that Democrats are more likely to deliver on their chief concerns: a skilled work force, because Democrats promote education, and deficit reduction, because Democrats are more willing to reduce spending on social programs than Republicans are to raise needed revenues.

“When we focus on the actual policies and policy differences, as opposed to the rhetoric, we win business over,” he insisted.

Representative Chris Van Hollen of Maryland cited 18 tax cuts and increased lending for small businesses under President Obama, adding, “There’s a lot that’s been done.”

As it happens, corporate America and Wall Street have largely recovered from the recession, even as the small businesses and workers that Mr. Obama and other Democrats focus on continue to struggle. The stock market hit its highest level in four years Thursday before Mr. Obama accepted the nomination and, on the morning after, the monthly jobs report again proved disappointing.

For all the emphasis at Democrats’ convention on touting the administration’s rescue of the auto industry, the Big Three manufacturers were not in evidence. With taxpayers still owning about 30 percent of General Motors, the company broke from its past practice of providing cars for officials at both parties’ conventions, an official said. A Republican at a competing auto manufacturer said, “I think business in general has a smaller presence at both conventions, and the auto industry is no different.”

Corporate America was represented at the Democratic convention by the likes of AT&T, Comcast, Bank of America and high-tech companies like Google. A few Democratic stalwarts from Wall Street showed up, including Robert E. Rubin and Roger C. Altman, who were, respectively, Treasury secretary and deputy Treasury secretary in the Clinton administration, and Mark T. Gallogly, a co-founder of the investment firm Centerbridge Partners.

Notably present â€" given the Wall Street defections from Mr. Obama’s cause â€" was Hamilton E. James, president of the private equity firm Blackstone, who was attending a convention for the first time. Blackstone’s co-founder, Stephen A. Schwarzman, is a top Romney fund-raiser. But Mr. James, who has expressed concern for rising income inequality, decided to do the same for the president after some courtship.

Republicans, reflecting a more populist conservative base in the South and West, used their convention to showcase support for small business as their way of reaching the middle class.

“You have a party becoming the champion of small business, which is where the middle class starts,” said Carly Fiorina, a former chief executive of Hewlett-Packard.

Among Republican convention speakers were executives of companies that Bain Capital invested in, attesting to Mr. Romney’s qualifications and questioning Mr. Obama’s ability to handle a struggling economy. “You have to ask yourself,” said Tom Stemberg, who headed Staples, “Why would an administration that can’t create any jobs demonize someone who did?”

So it was that in the Democrats’ counterprogramming, Governor Markell, the former Nextel executive, said in his remarks that just because Mr. Romney succeeded in business, it “does not mean he deserves to be president.”

Jonathan Weisman contributed reporting.

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