IMPORTANT NOTICE: The Second Annual Mullings-Travel-for-Miles trip starts today. Where better to spend the intra-holiday season than among the most Gregarious, Ebullient, Friendly, Fun-Loving, Party-'Till-You-Drop people on the planet? That's right ...
The Swiss!
Mullings will be writing from Geneva, Switzerland for the rest of the week. If you missed last year's Paris Travelogue, you can read it and catch up with ALL the Travelogues here.
Ok. Paul O'Neill.
One week after the mid-term elections, a CNN-Gallup-USA Today poll indicated Americans approved of the way President George W. Bush was handling the economy by a margin of 55-39. There was, however, one person who did NOT approve of the way President Bush was handling the economy: President Bush.
Dana Milbanks, in his A1 story in Sunday's Washington Post, described the requested resignations of the
Treasury Secretary - Paul O'Neill - and the Economic Council head - Larry Lindsey - as a departure from the well-documented Bush loyalty model.
"Though it has been widely reported that both officials' jobs were in jeopardy, Lindsey recently told friends that he was secure because the president's code of loyalty did not allow for politically advantageous firings."
This anecdote speaks volumes about Lindsay's misunderstanding of this President. President Bush puts a high value on loyalty, but will not pay a price of insufficiency.
When George W. was running the Texas Rangers baseball team, this was a standard parable told in Dallas describing the difference between Bush p�re and Bush fils:
If a ballplayer - say a center fielder - wasn't doing the job for the Rangers, the father would likely say, "He's working hard. He just moved his family to the mid-cities. It's not his fault he's having trouble getting to a ball hit to his glove hand, or hitting a slider at his knees. Let's keep him until the end of the season and see if we can trade him somewhere he'd like to go."
The son would likely say, "Get me a new center fielder."
The Administration missed its opportunity to get the best out of Paul O'Neill. He should have been sold to the public and the Congress, right from the start, as the Administration's "quirky genius."
In that way, when he said something very smart - which he did with great regularity - they could have said, "See? That's the genius." And when he trotted off to Africa with Bono: "See? That's the quirky part."
However, O'Neill could not, in effect, hit a major league slider when it came to helping to sell the President's economic policies, and in dealing with the Congress, he could not move to his glove hand.
In fact, the U.S. Embassy in Germany's web site has this to say about the out-going Treasury Secretary:
"Not well known to Wall Street financiers, O'Neill has long had good relations with Vice President Dick Cheney and Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan ... Although O'Neill did not emerge from the financial community as his predecessors did, he gained experience with global capital flows as the head of two major industrial companies."
It might be helpful for the new Secretary of Treasury to understand the idiom of Wall Street. Wall Street big-timers talk with financial reporters in New York who talk with political reporters in Washington who write about how well (or badly) the Treasury Secretary is doing.
With changes at Treasury, at the Council of Economic Advisors, and at the Securities and Exchange Commission over the past four weeks, it is clear that President Bush is determined to set the economy on a new course. Keep in mind that Alan Greenspan's term expires in just 18 months which means this President will appoint the next chairman of the Federal Reserve in 2004.
Just as movement Conservatives are eagerly awaiting the new Senate to fill vacancies in the Federal judiciary, fiscal Conservatives should watch closely as President Bush takes dramatic steps to transform the US economy for decades to come.
In effect, the President is rebuilding the country's economic team up the middle.
On the Secret Decoder Ring today: Links to the TRAVELOGUES, links to the Washington Post article and the U.S. Embassy web, and the Mullfoto of the day.
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