Valerie Jarrett: 'Business is really not a partisan issue'
By JOHN F. HARRIS & EAMON JAVERS | 1/25/10 10:56 PM EST
White House senior adviser Valerie Jarrett vowed that President Barack Obama will keep up his aggressive outreach to the business community, even as the president steps up his attacks against irresponsible players on Wall Street and in the insurance industry.
“Business is really not a partisan issue,” Jarrett said in an interview for POLITICO’s new video series, “Inside Obama’s Washington.” “What I hear from the business community all the time is that they want a strong economy. That’s a goal that the president shares. They want to create the kind of environment in this country where they feel secure about investing and building for the future, and that’s completely consistent with the president’s objective to create jobs.”
Yet Jarrett also criticized Thursday’s Supreme Court ruling allowing corporations to make unlimited contributions to political campaigns, saying, “If you do create a system where there is too much power in the hands of special interests — whether that’s the business community or a wide range of lobbyists that have been used to dominating Washington because they can raise these enormous sums of money — [it] skews the decision making in Washington, and we don’t believe in that.”
Jarrett’s comments reflect the delicate balancing act Obama is undertaking with his business outreach, as he dispatches Jarrett and other top aides to help instill confidence in Obama’s economic program within the corporate community.
But at the same time, Obama is facing a political imperative to step up his populist rhetoric against big banks on Wall Street in the face of the growing public sense that the players who contributed to the global meltdown are getting off scot-free.
Jarrett insisted the two sets of views aren’t inconsistent. “There is an enormous alignment between the president’s agenda and that of the business community,” Jarrett said. “And that’s particularly the case in this kind of economic crisis.”
In the interview, Jarrett defended the White House’s tough talk to certain parts of corporate America. “A big part of our economic crisis that we experienced a year ago was due to really inappropriate risky behavior on the part of a few, a very few, and it’s important that those few are checked so that that does not ever happen again,” she said.
“What we want to do is to put the kinds of checks and balances in, so that that kind of risky behavior is not guaranteed by the taxpayer.”
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