• CEOs offer Obama support to avoid fiscal cliff

    By NBC's Ali Weinberg

     

    Business executives who met with Barack Obama Wednesday to discuss the fiscal cliff said the president was receptive to their suggestions but said the onus remained on Congress to avoid not going over the cliff.  

    Xerox CEO Ursula M. Burns said the meeting was “very constructive, very positive” but that the leaders “didn’t get into too many specifics.” She said they would stand by if the president required their public advocacy.

    “We were very clear that if we could help him to get to a solution we are absolutely behind him because going over the cliff is not something that any of us in the room could live with,” Burns said.

    The meeting occurred a day after President Obama met with labor leaders, who came away saying the president assured them that he would only accept a deal that raised rates on the wealthy and kept them low for middle-class Americans. Those leaders, including the AFL-CIO’s Richard Trumka, seemed more committed to staging a public relations campaign over the tax rates than the CEOs did.

    On the whole, the CEOs seemed satisfied that their voices would be heard in this round of negotiations; a source familiar with the 80-minute discussion inside the Roosevelt Room said the White House expressed more of a commitment to keep business leaders involved with the fiscal talks than they did during the 2011 talks, but did not elaborate on how that communication would occur.

    Honeywell CEO David Cote praised the president for being engaged, telling CNBC in an interview that talking to him was “not just a case of talking to somebody who’s doing his Blackberry at the same time,” but added that he is still concerned that Congress could get a deal before the end-of-year combination of spending cuts and tax increases kicks in.

    “I am not convinced we won’t go off the fiscal cliff. Because that requires two sides to agree, so I’m not convinced of that,” Cote told NBC after his interview. 

    Wal-Mart CEO Mike Duke issued a statement after the meeting, warning of the damage Congress would do to consumer confidence if they weren’t able to reach a compromise.

    “Wal-Mart moms tell us their confidence in the economy is shaped by whether they believe Washington is working for them. If the White House and Congress can reach agreement, it will show them the nation’s leaders can address big issues, and it will help raise their confidence in their government and their future.”

    Earlier in the day, some of the CEOs previewed what they would recommend to the president when they met with him.

    “We support ‘loophole closers’ but only in the context of broadening the income tax base while lowering rates and moving to a competitive territorial system like most of the rest of the world,” Proctor and Gamble spokesman Paul Fox said in a statement Tuesday evening. P&G’s CEO Robert McDonald also attended Wednesday’s meeting.

    The Campaign to Fix the Debt, a group founded by former Fiscal Commission chairs Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles, some of whose CEO Council members were in the meeting, also indicated what they would ask for in a statement released last week.

    “Any plan to address our debt must replace the abrupt fiscal cliff with a gradual and intelligent plan to reduce spending, make structural entitlement reforms, and enact comprehensive tax reform which cuts tax preferences in order to lower rates and reduce deficits,” the group said in response to Obama’s inviting business leaders to the White House last Friday.

     

  • Romney wrestles with auto bailouts heading into Michigan primary

    By Michael O'Brien, msnbc.com

     

    Mitt Romney is working to stress his Michigan roots and empathy for the state's auto industry as part of a new offensive ahead of the Great Lake State's Feb. 28 primary.

    In a new television ad and an op-ed Tuesday in the Detroit News, Romney reminded Michigan Republicans of his upbringing in the state, while working to better couch his opposition to the 2009 bailouts of General Motors and Chrysler engineered by President Obama.

    "I grew up in Michigan; it was exciting to be here," Romney says in the ad, in which he appears driving a Chrysler 300. "Michigan's been my home; this is personal."

    In the ad, Romney also addresses the federal bailout of the auto industry in broad terms, asking, "How in the world did an industry and its leaders and its unions get in such a fix," while accusing Obama of having done "all these things the liberals had wanted to do for years" without adding specifics.

    Joshua Lott / Reuters

    Republican presidential candidate and former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney speaks during a campaign event in Mesa, Arizona February 13, 2012.

    It's a sentiment echoed in Romney's piece in today's Detroit News, in which he expands on his opposition to the 2009 bailout.

    The effort seems directed at softening some of the attacks directed at Romney by Democrats associated with the former Massachusetts governor's opposition to Obama's handling of the bailout, outlined famously in a New York Times op-ed titled "Let Detroit Go Bankrupt."

    Obama and his campaign count the revivals for GM and Chrysler among the administration's greatest successes in its first term. Obama trumpeted Chrysler's early repaying of some bridge loans and improved balance sheets by both companies, although the government maintains a significant equity share in both automakers.

    "Does anyone believe what Mitt says: that the American auto industry would be better off today if the president hadn't intervened in 2009?" Obama campaign adviser David Axelrod tweeted Tuesday morning.

    Other Democratic surrogates attacked Romney for trying to soften or even reverse his position ahead of the primary.

    "All of them are wrong," former Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm said of the GOP field during a DNC conference call Tuesday, "but for Romney in particular it shows that the man has no principles, no core."

    "Remember, that was then and this is now. Then he said let them go into bankruptcy," said Michigan Rep. John Dingell, seizing on a portion in Romney's op-ed hailing GM and Chrysler's revival. "He is now finding that success is here, and he wants to rush out and claim success, and claim participation in that success."

    Romney's opposition to the bailout does little to distinguish him from his competitors in the Republican primary in Michigan.

    Former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum, who's surged nationally versus Romney since scoring upset victories in a trio of nominating contests last week, appears poised to take a run at Romney on his home turf in Michigan. Santorum's on the air in the Wolverine State, and some automated polls (which aren't recognized by NBC News) suggest Santorum is within striking distance of victory in the Michigan primary, which Romney won during his presidential campaign of 2008.

    Moreover, Santorum's position on the auto bailouts is virtually identical to Romney's. "I called for a structured bankruptcy from the very beginning," Santorum said in January on C-SPAN. "They could have gone through a structured bankruptcy. And the only difference between those two companies coming out of bankruptcy versus the bailouts Obama put in place was that the unions wouldn’t take ownership share of the company. The bondholders who were all in line under the rule of law should have gotten their fairer share of the company."

    Former House Speaker Gingrich has also voiced opposition to the auto industry bailout.

    Romney has homed in now on the treatment of unions as a main point of criticism toward Obama's handling of the managed bankruptcy. Romney says the president had eventually pursued the managed bankruptcy option Romney had preferred, but did so in a way that unfairly advantaged the UAW and organized labor over Chrysler and GM's secured creditors -- most of which are located on Wall Street.

    "While a lot of workers and investors got the short end of the stick, Obama's union allies — and his major campaign contributors — reaped reward upon reward, all on the taxpayer's dime," Romney wrote in the Detroit News piece, in which he calls for the government to sell off its shares of GM.

    But Romney's new strides this week appear more directed at responding to attacks by Democrats, not his rivals in the presidential campaign. The bailout remains generally popular in Michigan, and even some congressional Republicans who represent the issue are on record in favor of the Obama administration's support for GM and Chrysler. Democrats' attacks are meant to saddle Romney in parts of the Midwest where the auto industry remains dominant, and drive up his negatives both for the Republican primary and the general election. (Obama led Romney, 48 to 40 percent, in a January 2012 EPIC/MRA poll of likely Michigan voters, erasing an advantage that Romney had held over the president in 2011 polls.)

    Those efforts to define Romney might be aided by Romney's own history on the issue, now trying to largely take credit for the path the Obama adminstration pursued after having pleaded for Washington to ease the path for automakers during the 2008 GOP primary in Michigan.

    "The question is, where is Washington?" Romney said during that campaign, according to an account by the New York Times, specifically decrying new fuel efficiency standards for Detroit's Big Three. "Where does it stop? Is there a point at which someone says 'enough'? Or are we going to allow the entire domestic automotive manufacturing industry to disappear?"