The process of cashing in
Well, this isn’t what I was hoping to see. Obama has agreed to do a talk at a health care conference sponsored by a Wall Street investment bank for the modest sum of Four Hundred Thousand Dollars.
Out of office for about three months, Mr. Obama has begun the process of cashing in. In February, he and his wife, Michelle, each signed book deals worth tens of millions of dollars. And Mr. Obama’s spokesman confirmed last week that he is beginning the paid-speech circuit.
A $400,000 speaking fee for addressing the Cantor Fitzgerald conference is a sharp increase from the amounts typically paid to his predecessors. Former President Bill Clinton averaged about $200,000 per speech while former President George W. Bush is reportedly paid $100,000 to $175,000 for each appearance.
I suppose nobody much wants to listen to Bush do a talk, even Republicans.
Aaron Blake at the Post has thoughts on why Obama shouldn’t be chasing the bucks the way the Clintons did.
For one thing, it continues a bad precedent.
George W. Bush and Bill Clinton did this, too, as have Hillary Clinton, Ben Bernanke and Alan Greenspan. And the more that Wall Street firms give out-of-office presidents and big-name politicians these paydays, the more they become the norm. Other presidents will know that such payments are on the table, and it risks coloring their decisions with regard to Wall Street and special interests.
Which is already happening with Obama, retroactively. Liberals loved (and miss) his presidency, but if there’s one thing the Elizabeth Warren/Bernie Sanders wing is still sore about in the Obama administration, it’s the lack of prosecutions for anybody involved in the financial crisis. In September, Warren, a senator from Massachusetts, requested a formal investigation of why no charges were brought.
And now they’re paying him? Appearances, dude.
Also, this shouldn’t be why people go into government. The more people do it, the more it gets normalized. How’s that working out for us so far?
Blake quotes that bit from The Audacity of Hope that I blogged about recently.
I can’t assume that the money chase didn’t alter me in some ways. …
Increasingly I found myself spending time with people of means — law firm partners and investment bankers, hedge fund managers and venture capitalists. As a rule, they were smart, interesting people, knowledgeable about public policy, liberal in their politics, expecting nothing more than a hearing of their opinions in exchange for their checks. But they reflected, almost uniformly, the perspectives of their class: the top 1 percent or so of the income scale that can afford to write a $2,000 check to a political candidate. …
And although my own worldview and theirs corresponded in many ways — I had gone to the same schools, after all, had read the same books, and worried about my kids in many of the same ways — I found myself avoiding certain topics during conversations with them, papering over possible differences, anticipating their expectations. On core issues I was candid; I had no problem telling well-heeled supporters that the tax cuts they’d received from George Bush should be reversed. Whenever I could, I would try to share with them some of the perspectives I was hearing from other portions of the electorate: the legitimate role of faith in politics, say, or the deep cultural meaning of guns in rural parts of the state.
Still, I know that as a consequence of my fundraising I became more like the wealthy donors I met, in the very particular sense that I spent more and more of my time above the fray, outside the world of immediate hunger, disappointment, fear, irrationality, and frequent hardship of the other 99 percent of the population — that is, the people that I’d entered public life to serve.
And yet here we are.
Word is the deal for the two books the two Obamas will write was $65 million. You’d think they could skip the chats to bankers.
I continue to wonder: after your first $10 mill or so, what the hell do you *do* with all that money? Other than endow Worthy Causes perhaps, of which we have no noticeable shortage. And if your presence is that bankable, tell ’em to write the check straight to Worthy Cause and cut out the middleman.
Steve Watson: I wonder that exact thing. Which I guess marks me as a Little Person®. Everyone wants money. Everyone wants to be secure and comfortable. But what’s the difference in the comfort and security that 10 million and 100 million can buy? I must have a small imagination.
The difference is the feeling of power, I suppose. It’s all in who you compare yourself with. We compare ourselves with the people around us; for instance, I might compare my income with that of the college president, or the local big wig. Obama is surrounded by the Clintons, the Trumps, etc.
Still, I don’t think any of them are immune. Shortly after the convention, Bernie Sanders purchased his third house, for $600,000. That’s more than 6x what I paid for my only house…then he goes around wondering why billionaires need so many cars. Really?
Money is the kingpin in Washington, in Hollywood, and on Wall Street. The rest of us exist just to do the work that makes the Clintons, the Obamas, and the Trumps of the world rich. Then they go around “feeling our pain”. Yeah, right.
Ben,
There’s a word for that attitude of relentless accumulation, it’s ‘greed’. The difference between $10 million and $100 million is clear, more power, more politicians in the pocket and even more money. I can’t understand how any society with multi-millionaires can be a true democracy, particularly if the pricks control major media companies.
Yesterday I saw Amanda Marcotte tweet about this, to the effect that it’s easy to criticise someone for taking a $400,000 payday if you’ve never been poor yourself (which doesn’t imply that no poor person has made such a criticism or that everyone who does make such a criticism is rich, or that all criticism is invalid). And it’s also easy for me, as a poor person with an effectively zero chance of being offered a $400,000 cheque for any single thing in my life, to say I’d decline such an offer out of principle. But if such an offer came up, I would honestly be hard-pressed to refuse it, knowing how ephemeral and fragile and uncertain the future really is.
The Obamas may now be millionaires, but they weren’t always so, and like the Clintons they’re entitled to weigh their actions by the impact on their lives personally as well as the impact on the Republic.
Jeez, it’s not easy for me as a poor person to say I’d decline such an offer out of principle. I haven’t said that. That’s not what this post is about. The Obamas are not poor, and they have abundant ways to get richer from now on. There’s nothing that forces them to accept lavish honoraria from bankers.
And no, I don’t agree that morally speaking they are entitled to accept lavish honoraria from bankers because it’s always nice to have more cash. I don’t think we have to aim that low, and I don’t think we should.
As someone who has quit a job on principle, I agree that it isn’t easy to turn down money when you don’t have it. It wasn’t easy for me – it was made easier by the fact that I had a husband working, but still, he was a librarian, which means he was underpaid for his education, so…
The problem that such an argument – about poor people, I mean – is people like Trump. He has not been poor. George W. Bush has not been poor (oh, he poor talks in his autobiography, but he always had Daddy to fall back on, unlike some people, like Bill Clinton). It isn’t really about whether someone has been poor, is it? It’s about the role of money in this society, and success being decided on a hierarchy of who has the most.
I consider myself a success, in spite of living on a professor’s salary, which is better than most people have, but is way below the amount required for success these days. Trump, however, would consider me “sad”! a “loser”! For the most part, my position will not open any doors to power. Wealth is the only measure of success, and many people use inherited wealth as their measure of success. They were born successful, while the rest of us have to strive for that, and few ever reach it.
“It’s about the role of money in this society, and success being decided on a hierarchy of who has the most.”
With the prevalence of the “Prosperity Gospel” and the Protestant Work Ethic, money and wealth are not simply measures of success but are used as indicators of moral worth. If the wealth of individuals is God’s will, then they must be worthy of God’s blessing. Mysteriously, this divine imprimatur only seems to work for some and not for others. Trump is OK, but George Soros is the Antichrist, though the latter, by most measures, is a better business person (and person, period) than the former.
iknklast, the story about Sanders and the house was that his wife inherited a house, but its location was not convenient for their family, so they sold it and bought that one instead. It’s a very common psychology – the money for the house came from a house that was given to them – ie it was already ‘house money’ so it’s not a bad thing that they keep it as such rather than donate it (though they could buy real estate that could be used for a charitable cause). BTW on pro-Sanders blogs people were all about how small and modest the house was and how it didn’t even have air conditioning.
SW: “I continue to wonder: after your first $10 mill or so, what the hell do you *do* with all that money? ”
Same as the fortunes the executive class organise for themselves. They spend a bit on status gimmicks, and eventually their kids inherit the lot. And inherited wealth was what the European aristocracy has been, was and still is about. We are watching the formation of an aristocracy, just as astronomers can watch the (very slo-mo) formation of a galaxy.
Income disparities are widening. Who knows? In time, the descendants of today’s plutocrats will probably have entitlements and titles.
Lord Donald Trump of Mar del Lago or whatever it is.: I’m not sure it has the right ring to it, but if delivered while looking down the snoot at the target person, it might just work.
From the New York Times? The fickle pamphlet that just hired a science denier as a featured writer?
Can’t figure out why — anything to do with money perhaps?