Pat Dollard

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“Dreams From Karl Marx: A story of Subversive Revolution”

Politico:

In President Barack Obama’s Cabinet, there is a Nobel Prize winner, a former mayor, and a veteran CIA agent. Surrounding him in the White House West Wing are a former four-star general, one of the nation’s most eminent economists, and a handful of this generation’s most talented political operatives.

This constellation of talent, however, has something of a black hole. There is virtually no one on Obama’s team with outsized achievements or a high-profile reputation earned in the world of business.

There are no former CEOs in the Obama Cabinet. And among the people who make up his daily inner circle, there is only a dollop or two of top-level private sector experience.

This is a notable absence, particularly for an administration whose domestic reputation will hinge on whether it can reverse one of the steepest economic downturns in decades. Most recent administrations—Democratic as well as Republican—have included several people who were bold-faced names in the corporate world before assuming influential jobs in Washington.

Some long-time White House observers find it noteworthy that when Obama convenes his best minds there will be few people who have answered to shareholders as well as voters—people who know by intuition how the business community is likely to react to any given day’s news.

“It tells us a lot about Barack Obama, that these executives are just not part of his most inner circle,” said Stephen Hess, a senior fellow emeritus at the Brookings Institution. “There’s always been a place in government for these people who come from the business world, whether at Commerce, Defense, Treasury, or on the White House staff. But suddenly they’re not there.”

Among Obama’s inner circle, the most well-known former executive is Senior Advisor Valerie Jarrett, who was CEO of a real estate firm called The Habitat Company before joining Obama on the campaign trail and in the White House. It was Jarrett that Obama turned to when he needed an emissary to dispatch to the World Economic Forum earlier this year in Davos, Switzerland.

That relative paucity of corporate experience doesn’t bother John Castellani, the President of Business Roundtable, an association of chief executive officers of leading U.S. corporations. Asked whether the relative absence of CEOs is good, bad or indifferent, Castellani said, “It’s indifferent. They’ve been very aggressive in reaching out to the business community.” Castellani says his organization was able to offer plenty of input into the debate over the stimulus, including suggestions for business tax cuts, health information technology and other issues.

After the implosion of Obama’s picks for Secretary of Commerce and Secretary of Health and Human Services, the president has two remaining chances to place a high ranking corporate executive in the Cabinet. But so far, he’s shown little inclination to do so: His first two selections for Commerce were a governor (Bill Richardson of New Mexico) and a senator (Judd Gregg of New Hampshire). Across the rest of his cabinet, Obama has shown a penchant for picking people with deep political experience, showing a particular fondness for ex-senators.

That’s in contrast with other recent administrations, which have seen a host of ex-CEOs and businesspeople in the president’s inner circle. George W. Bush, for example, selected three consecutive ex-CEOs as Treasury secretary: Paul O’Neill, former CEO of Alcoa, John Snow, former CEO of CSX, and Hank Paulson, former CEO of Goldman Sachs. By contrast, Obama’s pick for the same position is Timothy Geithner, a veteran bureaucrat who served as president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.