In the wee hours of Wednesday morning Warren Buffett briefly headlined a report on the town hall interrogation of Mssrs Obama and McCain. Then it disappeared. Early in the program, moderator Tom Brokaw asked, Who do you have in mind to appoint the most powerful officer in the cabinet now, secretary of the US Treasury?

That was a interesting question, a timely one. Much of the candidates' policy debates hash modest differences in implementation but stark differences in style between them on how to commercialize government functions. Callers-in to radio talk shows are reluctant to abandon the notion, the US is the richest nation on earth. Pat and Pat Homeowner's worries are wrapped in "negative equity" captured by their real estate and retirement portfolios. Which man or woman would best personifiy full faith in and credit of the US capital markets could tip a voter's preference for president. Brokaw's question yoked th Bailout prospectus to the dubious leadership in either candidate's known panel of money managers.

I wonder how the audience responded to the candidates' answer. I'm not entirely convinced their agreement was meant as a joke. Or Warren Buffet's nomination was a shrewd and cynical gambit to ratchet the financiers' new power of the purse. Buffett's legendary status not only prime middle-class profit motive in support bitterly contested legislation. It recollects the absolute authority with which Jesse Jones once governed the portfolios of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC) and Department of Commerce.

So ends another weekly tournament of candidate jousting in the corporate media. For the period 17 - 27 March, heralded by the preposterous merger of JPMorgan and Bear Stearns, the candidates' rhetorical ground was bounded by their determination to vanquish America's "housing crisis." At the moment, journalists are flogging candidates' contempt for the other's proposal as delivered recently to economically depressed voters in North Carolina and Pennsylvania. Mrs Clinton had bolted from her gate 24 March, and Mr Obama followed suit 27 March. As we shall see both evinced diametrically opposed perspectives on the "contagion," or panic, enveloping the domestic economy and thus appropriate remedies available to the president-elect. Their differences are apparent from the outset, from the historical platforms each chooses to establish his and her programs.

BHO: The great task before our Founders that day was putting into practice the ideal that government could simultaneously serve liberty and advance the common good. For Alexander Hamilton, the young Secretary of the Treasury, that task was bound to the vigor of the American economy. Hamilton had a strong belief in the power of the market. But he balanced that belief with the conviction that human enterprise "may be beneficially stimulated by prudent aids and encouragements on the part of the government." Government, he believed, had an important role to play in advancing our common prosperity. So he nationalized the state Revolutionary War debts, weaving together the economies of the states and creating an American system of credit and capital markets. ...

I think all of us here today would acknowledge that we've lost that sense of shared prosperity.

HRC: As the headlines of the past months have made clear, we are experiencing a crisis of confidence in our country. We have a crisis of confidence in our leadership with respect to Iraq and we have a crisis of confidence in our economy. What started out as a subprime mortgage crisis has now become a national credit crisis, rippling out from banks and boardrooms to businesses and living rooms across America. We've had three straight months of private sector job losses. Consumer confidence is down and falling. The dollar has hit record lows and gas prices, record highs. And last week the Federal Reserve took unprecedented measures to rescue Wall Street, the likes of which we haven't seen since the Great Depression. ...

We need a president who is ready on day one to be Commander-in-Chief of our economy.

Is this yesterday's news here at ET? I'm feeling rather smug at the moment.

Bloomberg

In other words: Tony Blair need not apply.

Blair, 54, is weighing a bid for EU president, a job set to be created next year. The same questions raised about his 10 years as U.K. leader -- doubts about his EU loyalties, the legacy of Iraq, allegations of showmanship -- dog his European career prospects.

"I don't think he would be the right character," says Enrique Baron Crespo of Spain, a former EU Parliament president. A Stop Blair! campaign organized by a Paris investment banker has gathered 24,000 signatures.
[...]
President Blair "would be a bad idea," says Jerome Guillet, the Stop Blair! founder. "He promised that he would bring Britain into Europe and he didn't even try. And the invasion and occupation of Iraq is a pretty bad symbol for Europe, which is built on peace."
[...]
"I have some difficulty seeing how the president could come from a country that is for a large part outside the union," says former Belgian Prime Minister Jean-Luc Dehaene, a co-drafter of the failed EU constitution that formed the basis for the Lisbon Treaty.

Bravo!

MPAA-rated "G" at Docudharma. MPAA-rated "R" at PFF. NB. author's content versioning policy

About a million years ago I satisfied a b-school homework assignment by writing on this very subject, Job wrestling Gabriel to create "value" from a [non-performing, sackoshit] operation. That would be you, multiplied. The text is reproduced below. Go on, suck up a portion of my tuition, valued at $95K (2002 USD excluding room and board), entitled "Leading Strategic Transformation." The purpose of the elective was to identify C-class mechanisms of crisis management and their instrumentality in engineering corporate "turn-around" scenarios and option calls.

That means [corporate managers] playing the odds and the capital, including you [fuckers] who are oblivious to your [financial and intellectual] debts to corporate acculturation.