Conservative
Type 40
The Exasperation of the Democratic Billionaire
Democratic billionaire calls Obama the biggest threat to jobs and progress
'It's as if he doesn't like people," says real-estate mogul and New York Daily News owner Mortimer Zuckerman of the president of the United States. Barack Obama doesn't seem to care for individuals, elaborates Mr. Zuckerman, though the president enjoys addressing millions of them on television.
The Boston Properties CEO is trying to understand why Mr. Obama has made little effort to build relationships on Capitol Hill or negotiate a bipartisan economic plan. A longtime supporter of the Democratic Party, Mr. Zuckerman wrote in these pages two months ago that the entire business community was "pleading for some kind of adult supervision" in Washington and "desperate for strong leadership." Writing soon after the historic downgrade of U.S. Treasury debt by Standard & Poor's, he wrote, "I long for a triple-A president to run a triple-A country."
Democratic billionaire calls Obama the biggest threat to jobs and progress
Las Vegas mogul Steve Wynn, a “Harry Reid-supporting Democrat,” lambasted the Obama administration “for destroying the U.S. business climate despite all of his talk about creating jobs,” noting that:
the business community in this country is frightened to death of the weird political philosophy of the President of the United States. And until he’s gone, everybody’s going to be sitting on their thumbs.
“Wynn said he could very quickly create 10,000 new jobs himself and with the multiplier effect help create another 20,000 hires in Las Vegas. But like many other business people in both parties, he’s holding back under the current Democratic Obama administration:
I’m afraid to do anything in the current political environment in the United States. You watch television and see what’s going on, on this debt ceiling issue. And what I consider to be a total lack of leadership from the President and nothing’s going to get fixed until the President himself steps up and wrangles both parties in Congress…I’m saying it bluntly, that this administration is the greatest wet blanket to business and progress and job creation in my lifetime…
Those of us who have business opportunities and the capital to do it are going to sit in fear of the President. And a lot of people don’t want to say that. They’ll say, “Oh God, don’t be attacking Obama.” Well, this is Obama’s deal, and it’s Obama that’s responsible for this fear in America.
The guy keeps making speeches about redistribution, and maybe we ought to do something to businesses that don’t invest or holding too much money. We haven’t heard that kind of talk except from pure socialists. Everybody’s afraid of the government, and there’s no need to soft peddling it, it’s the truth.”