Political chain reactions were initiated this past week with consequences that could flow through the years.
Or not. Republicans could refuse to study and apply the lessons of the Scott Brown Senate campaign in Massachusetts in other races.The GOP could stick with 20th century technology and with message mavens from 2006 and 2008.
Or Democrats could tack quickly back to the center of the political mainstream, abandoning Obamacare and cap-and-tax, selling GM back into private hands, and slashing spending to sustainable levels, while extending some of the Bush tax cuts as a genuine incentive for job creation. Not likely, but we can dream.
No matter what the parties and their candidates do, however, the real choice now rests with the boards and senior management of America’s suddenly-free-to-speak-on-politics corporations. If many of them choose to use the First Amendment rights that were restored to them by last week’s Supreme Court decisionto push for the election of candidates committed to the preservation of dynamic democratic capitalism, the already massive shift in American politics back to Reaganism could accelerate.
A shift of the House back to GOP control and large pickups by Republicans in the Senate — and in places like New York and California — are already possible. Smart, targeted and sustainedcorporate participation in politics could assure those outcomes.
Will chairmen and chief executive officers take the steps now open to them to help correct the nation’s economic course? As successful private-sector participants, they know very well that the president’s economic “program” is nothing of the sort; that the massive increase in spending is destructive beyond measure and unrelated to the panic of 2008.
Many of them heard the president’s wild attacks on the financial sector last week and understood it to be the first round in a desperate political appeal to the hard-left wingof the Democrats to rally to the president’s faltering standing and to attempt to harness the populism coursing through the country.
Obama’s market-shaking demagoguery came on the same day as the Supreme Court’s long-awaited restoration of First Amendment rights to corporations and those who invest in them and work for them. Just in time, perhaps, to allow corporate leadership tohelp keep the basic free-market approach of America intact and functioning.
But that leadership will have to act decisively, and with an eye on protecting their brand and their business operations. Transparency will be key — voters should know why a corporation is acting and how — and the very best brains of the political-business-legal-media world should be advising. Determining a corporate political strategy isn’t a job for old Washington insiders or off-the-rack political consultants with candidates to push and old ties to favor.
It requires first a theory of why the company will choose to intervene (or not), and then a strategy to do so effectively. The budget should match the priority assigned to protecting the rule of law from the sort of shifts that are even now imperiling many basic American industries. The coal companies, for example, face virtual extinction from the Obama-Boxer-Waxman regime of cap and tax. How will they fight back, and using what tools?
The Supreme Court has invited corporate America to fight for its economic life.The question is which of the companies will rise to that challenge and not delegate it to the Beltway wizards who brought them Obamacare and cap and tax and declared them the best that could be done.
Imagine where the economy would be if the D.C. consulting elites had told their clients to fight rather than bargain on terms of surrender.
Let’s hope that in boardrooms across America senior leadership is busy convening conversations about the next 10 months and their role in it. You don’t get many second chances in politics. Scott Brown and the First Amendment have givenenthusiasts of democratic capitalismjust such a chance.
Examiner Columnist Hugh Hewitt is a law professor at Chapman University Law School and a nationally syndicated radio talk show host who blogs daily at HughHewitt.com.
