Joan Swirsky
Wednesday, Jan. 14, 2004

I’m surprised that Paul H. O’Neill is not running on the Democrat ticket for president this year, because he clearly shares one major attribute with all the other wannabes: irrational rage at President Bush. But unlike the actual candidates, O’Neill’s rage seems less ideological and more ego-driven than the Iowa primary crowd.

Featured the other evening on “60 Minutes,” the former secretary of the treasury was interviewed by an enthralled Lesley Stahl about Ron Suskind’s new book, “The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O’Neill.”

Stahl, whose specialty seems to be delighting in those who demean, insult, slur or even lie about Republican presidents, was as enraptured as she was a couple of years ago during her fiasco of an interview with Edmund Morris about his 2002 so-called biography of President Reagan – an interview that should go down in history as Lesson One in how not to be an objective journalist!

In her vintage style, Stahl tried to put words in O’Neill’s mouth but he didn’t bite. Instead he insisted that the president, during high-powered meetings, was “disengaged” and like “a blind man in a room of deaf people.”

What the politically correct “journalist” and her clueless interviewee failed to appreciate was how offensive and insulting this statement was to millions of blind and hearing-impaired people, many of whom function on equal if not superior levels to the unimpaired.

During his interview, it soon became obvious that O’Neill’s main grievance was that the president didn’t take his advice! He even complained that when he first met the president, all the commander in chief did was to “listen”!

Wow! An employer who actually listened to what his employee had to say! How much more incompetent can an employer get?

Surely, this was not O’Neill’s style when he was chairman and CEO of Alcoa for 12 years or, for that matter, when he worked in other Republican administrations with people who apparently talked more than they listened.

When presented with the fact that the president’s judgment about tax cuts has now resulted in a recovering economy, O’Neill grudgingly admitted that, yes, things look good. But he recovered quickly enough to spout some drivel about what he would have done with America’s money. Stahl, meanwhile, was positively starry eyed.

While the likes of Howard Dean, Dick Gephardt, John Kerry, Joseph Lieberman, John Edwards – the list goes on of aspiring U.S. presidents – are enraged that President Bush, in their words, “stole” the last presidential election (forget about the Electoral College that decides this contest!) and that they’re all campaigning on non-issues like the economy, at least they’re parading on ideological platforms.

Not so of Mr. O’Neill, who has gone public because his paper-thin ego was deflated by two things, it appears, he had never in his life experienced before: (1) A rejection of his advice and (2) being fired.

An ancient bromide says that “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned,” but in his interview, the steely-eyed O’Neill made it clear that hellish fury is not the exclusive domain of the fair sex.

Along with the book’s author and numerous network TV interviews – including the one with the undisguised partisan Stahl – O’Neill is hitting back, trying to discredit a president who, by any objective measures, has succeeded spectacularly in both domestic and foreign policies.

And that is not to omit the president’s economic policies that have Wall Street, the American public and worldwide markets watching rising indexes with unbridled optimism.

O’Neill doesn’t address the president’s accomplishments because he is still rankling at not having his advice taken and, worse, being fired! He can’t get past his inflated view of himself and he can’t forgive the president for being right!

If O’Neill is looking for even a semblance of credibility, he should fly off to Iowa and join the other Bush-bashers in their ongoing orgy of rage toward the president. And in his next book, he’d be well advised to take on a man of less stature and vision than President Bush to win his arguments!

Joan Swirsky is a New-York-based journalist and author who can be reached at joansharon@aol.com

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