MBA Confessions (vol 2)

–by Mike Murray

In my childhood neighborhood, kids distinguished between whores and prostitutes this way: whores give it away for free; prostitutes charge for it.

That recollection puts me in mind of an old joke. A man asks a woman if she’ll satisfy him for a million dollars.

“Sure,” she says.

“How about for ten bucks?” he continues.

“Hell, no!” she indignantly replies. “What do you take me for?”

“Madam,” he retorts, “we’ve established what you are. Now we’re haggling over price.”

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MBAs learn early on that almost everything is negotiable, that nearly anything is possible. The relative strengths of supply and demand might define the intersection of mutual interest, they might establish the price level at which equilibrium is achieved. But the larger lesson is that a deal can almost always be struck.

Stated in connection with politics: For the right incentive almost anyone will roll over, that nearly everyone has his or her price.

The old expression “politics make strange bedfellows” is testament to the fact that most people are willing to sell out. It expresses the reality that even people you might have thought incorruptible end up compromising their stated principles in order to reach some desired outcome.

Sure, they speak of clothespins, of nose-holding, of half-loaves and the like. But they dicker nonetheless.

“Let’s make a deal” is the guiding principle of nearly all civilizations, it seems. Currencies vary, but trading a favor of one kind in return for another seems a universal practice. For the right price, nearly everything and everyone appears to be for sale.

Those who sell out often console themselves with rationalization. It’s the “to do a great right,” one must often “do a little wrong” concept (as one of Shakespeare’s characters defined it in The Merchant of Venice). They salve themselves with the notion that some greater good can be accomplished by compromising their convictions.

I wonder.

Rationalization, as a character in The Big Chill noted, is “more important than sex.” To a disagreeing chum, he asked, “Oh yeah? Ever gone a week without a rationalization?”

Without rationalization it would be impossible to invoke the name of Joseph McCarthy in smearing your political enemies — in accusing them of the dreaded sin of “McCarthyism” — while simultaneously ignoring the fact that no less than the sainted Bobby Kennedy schemed mightily, though unsuccessfully, to become McCarthy’s right-hand man. (He was beaten out by Roy Cohn in his drive to become 2nd banana on the “witch-hunting” committee. But it wasn’t for lack of effort.)

And RFK’s reputation as a civil-rights champion is hardly sullied by the fact that as U.S. Attorney General, he ordered the wiretapping of one Martin Luther King, Jr. Rationalization enables those of a particular political stripe to selectively recall his life (after all, he was “on our side” much of the time, right?).

For that matter, many of those now wringing their hands over supposed voter irregularities here in Ohio in 2004 have no problem with family patriarch Joe Kennedy’s shenanigans in Chicago’s Cook County during the ’60s on son Jack’s behalf — or with his family’s ties to nationally syndicated organized crime and the role those connections played in JFK’s victory.

And what about Richard “Tricky Dicky” Nixon? For many, it was justification enough to run him out of office that he simply “lied to the American people.” The question was breathlessly asked: “What did the president know, and when did he know it?” (Jimmy Carter won the next presidential election, in part, by promising unfailing honesty. To prove it, he announced in Playboy magazine that he “had lusted in [his] heart.”)

Granted, Nixon was a paranoid — supremely uncomfortable in his own skin. He was disliked by many, even among his own party. Even among his own staff. And the accumulation of his political and legal sins ultimately reached an impressive tally.

But let’s be honest: even paranoids have enemies. Nixon was right when he concluded that the press had one set of rules for Democrats, another for Republicans, and still another for him. A cover-up of a bungled political operation (hardly unusual in itself …Democrats crow these days when their own operatives infiltrate Republican campaigns, after all) did him in.

Contrast the way Nixon was treated with way the press dealt with Bill Clinton. On the day Monica Lewinsky gave critical sworn testimony, “Slick Willy” ordered the firing of a Tomahawk Cruise missile into a building supposedly operated by terrorists.

His contention was that chemical weapons were likely being manufactured inside, remember?

It turned out that the building was a harmless pharmaceutical factory. And that all of those slaughtered were innocent civilians, women and children among them.

The primary rationale offered for Clinton’s stated belief that the factory housed terrorist activity was the trace presence of an element in the lawn outside the building that sometimes is found in chemical weapons. Trouble is, it is also a very common ingredient in weed killer.

Pretty thin evidence of terrorism and for the subsequent justification of the ordering of a deadly missile strike, wouldn’t you say? (And for a “war on terror” that lasted all of one day.)

Some believed that Clinton ordered the military attack to push the news (successfully so, as it turned out) of the testimony of “that woman — Ms. Lewinsky” out of the prime position of the next-day’s media coverage. But those who concluded that didn’t include many of the hallowed journalists who stalked Nixon so relentlessly. Where were Woodward and Bernstein when we needed them?

Draw your own conclusion as to which president deserved more to be bounced from office. But I bet your position will depend a great deal on the party for which you routinely pull the lever in the ballot box.

Now, before anyone throws a hissy fit, I’ll allow that I’ve thus far only cited examples of liberals’ use of political rationalization. (Though that seems only fair when I consider that, in making their cases for wrong-doing in politics, many journalists — columnists and editorialists prime among them — seem only able to specifically recall right-wing examples of abuse.)

Still, I concede that favor-trading cuts both ways. Rationalization is the sole province of neither right- nor left-leaners. Selling out knows no party affiliation.

A couple of examples involving Republicans: There is a senator from my own state of Ohio — one George Voinovich — who recently stated that heavenly guidance directed him to break ranks with his party and take steps to block one of the president’s nominees. My gut tells me that his action had less to do with divine intervention than it did with some more earthly consideration.

(And I note with interest that a press corps that had previously pilloried the good senator for stating a connection between his religious beliefs and his actions as a public official now praise him. The church / state separation thing bothers them not at all in this instance. Hmmmm.)

Then there is the “maverick” senator who routinely and “bravely” these days bucks his party and his president. In 2000, many media liberals openly rooted for his nomination to the head of the Republican ticket. My suspicion is that this man’s willingness to “be his own man” has less to do with genuine independence than it does with cold calculation.

I am quite convinced that he was acting in 2000 — and continues to act now — in ways aimed at courting media affection. (Poor man, had he succeeded in winning the nomination in ’00 he would surely have awoken a day or two later to media criticism. Liberal members of the press would likely have pretended to suddenly discover, to their horror, that the guy is — gulp! — a staunch conservative.)

The rationalization that had allowed a “progressive”-leaning media to favor the man would surely have melted away in the direct sunlight of the senator’s lifelong voting record. A decidedly non-progressive voting record. (And what is the implied opposite of a “progressive” voting record, anyway? Are liberals laying claim to the term “progressive” in an attempt to portray conservatives as “regressive?”)

Still, had John McCain achieved the Republican nomination in 2000, each party would have gotten what it wanted. The senator would have made it through to the general election, and elements of the media would have helped set up a right-winger — an extremist who it would have had a better chance of knocking off in November than it did party-establishment candidate George W. Bush.

I have no doubt that there are a few people out there (of all manner of political ideology: liberals, conservatives, and moderates among them) who cannot be bought — under any circumstance, at any price.

My advice to you when you encounter them is to hang onto them for dear life. They are rarer than gold. And they are far more precious.

Berea Pundit