Democrats Bid Business Adieu

Wall Street Journal

Barack Obama meets with a flock of nervous bankers at
the White House tomorrow to reassure them he understands their interests. Good
luck. There has always been tension between the Democratic Party and the
private sector. That tension is over. With its vote in the House of
Representatives to punish corporate bonus payments, the national Democratic
Party has disconnected itself entirely from the private sector.

AP

AIG Chairman Edward Liddy
arrives on Capitol Hill, March 18, 2009.

The public bear-baiting of AIG's Ed Liddy, and then passage of the bonus bill, gave the nation
a good look at the modern Democratic Party freed of constraints.

The current version of the party has largely broken
free of any understanding whatsoever of the private sector -- how it works or
what it needs to function.

True socialists at least think about markets so they
can criticize them. The Democratic Party's leadership doesn't stir to even that
level of engagement. In the House, Senate and some corners of the Obama White
House, the party is acting as if the marketplace was the world of an alien
tribe, which it has to control through intimidation or demands for protective
tribute (read: campaign contributions).

This is not true of the entire 90% of self-identified
Democrats who voted for Barack Obama. But Democrats who work in real jobs
rather than work for the mothership in Washington
must recognize that the party's obsessions are becoming ever less hospitable to
a functioning economy, or Mr. Geithner's labors to
that goal.

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This decoupling has occurred mainly in the Northeast
(New England lost its last House Republican in 2008) and in California.
Invulnerable seats have allowed politicians from these regions to control key
committee chairs affecting the economy: Barney Frank (finance), Henry Waxman
(regulation) Pete Stark (the health subcommittee of Ways and Means), Chris Dodd
(Senate banking), Ted Kennedy (health), Barbara Boxer
(environment).

Put it this way: Imagine any of this generation's
Democratic establishment taking a job at Procter & Gamble in Cincinnati as
a middle-manager responsible for a division of employees and its annual profit
and loss. It is wholly inconceivable. Or helping an owner of
an auto-parts company manage through a real crisis. They wouldn't have a
clue.

That anti-bonus bill was not unique. It is routine.

With the passing of the anti-bonus bill, the national
Democratic Party completes its decoupling from the private sector, says Wonder
Land columnist Daniel Henninger.

Spending in the president's budget, skyrocketing to
28.5% of GDP this fiscal year, is a harbinger. No matter. This week two of the
party's "progressive" (the left) Web-based activist groups -- the
force that kept the Obama candidacy afloat -- announced an effort to harass
some 50 moderate-to-conservative Blue Dog Democrats in the House for expressing
doubts about Mr. Obama's reforms, such as "health care for all." They
name 20 "conservative" senators, including such notable right-wingers
as Evan Bayh, Mary Landrieu, Ben Nelson, Robert Byrd
and Blanche Lincoln. This is not your father's Democratic Party.

Wall Street's collapsed businesses and layoffs have
devastated New York's tax revenues. So what? Attorney General Andrew Cuomo
flogged Bank of America into giving up the names of Merrill Lynch bonus
recipients. Imagine the coincidence this week when two of Merrill's most
respected hands, analyst David Rosenberg and strategist Richard Bernstein,
quit. Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal and the legislature are
also mau-mauing AIG over bonuses.

Nor can it be said that these Democrats are merely scapegoating the private sector to deflect blame for the
politicians' share of the mortgage debacle. Using the private sector as the
party's punching bag is also now routine. Al Gore and
John Kerry ran at Big Oil, Big Pharma and Big
Insurance. With mercurial suppleness, so did the current president. These
"big" industries are proxies for the whole world of owners and
managers, who somehow now always find themselves beyond acceptable politics as
enemies of the people's interests. A Democratic Party that was always anti-Wall Street is becoming anti- Main Street.

Meanwhile, plaintiffs lawyers
assault the private sector, dig cash out of it, and transfer a percentage back
to Democratic re-election campaigns. Democrats in Congress then try to legislate provisions to make the private sector vulnerable
to more such lawsuits. Congress has passed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act,
with the Paycheck Fairness Act on tap.

If the private sector is now largely an abstraction to
Democrats in Congress, they will continue to make mistakes, explicit like the
bonus bill or just thoughtless errors that constantly disrupt operations for
private companies.

This will have a dampening effect on the U.S. growth
rate and its ability to create jobs, especially for new, younger entrants.

Some of Mr. Obama's supporters need to reboot their vision.
They did not sign on just to him, but to him and his party. That party is
creating a world of its own, a world being drained of oxygen for the kind of
people who build the nation's economy.