Hiring Tom Perkins to buff your image is like paying Donald
Trump to style your hair.
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| TechCrunch/ Flickr |
You know your presidential
campaign is in a heap of hurt when you need Tom Perkins to defend your
“abilities, intellect, and talent.”
But there Perkins was in The
New York Times recently, having bought a full-page ad attesting
to the presidential worthiness of Carly Fiorina — one of the gaggle of 17 GOP
seekers of the White House.
Fiorina is best known for being
dumped as CEO of Hewlett-Packard after driving its stock price into the ditch
and firing 30,000 workers. She’d recently been the subject of a Times article about
her “not so sterling” corporate leadership, so she did indeed need an emergency
buff-up on her image.
But by Tom Perkins? That’s like
asking Donald Trump to style your hair.
In a letter to The
Wall Street Journal, poor Perkins wailed about “a rising tide of hatred of
the successful one percent.” Moving from merely crotchety to paranoid
nuttiness, Perkins blathered that the “war on the American one percent” is like Nazi Germany’s
“war on its one percent, namely its Jews.”
He was, of course, roundly
ridiculed for wailing that billionaires like him are “victims,” and he was widely
denounced for comparing criticism of the wealthy to the unspeakable horrors of
the Holocaust. But even public humiliation couldn’t cure his malignant
narcissism, so he was soon back in the news with “The Tom Perkins System” to
relieve the plight of the put-upon rich.
Voting, he explained, should be
like owning stock in
a corporation, with rich taxpayers getting more votes: “You pay a
million dollars in taxes, you get a million votes,” says Tom.
Why would Carly Fiorina want a
public testimonial to her competence from a wacko plutocrat like Perkins?
OtherWords columnist Jim Hightower is a radio commentator,
writer, and public speaker. He edits the populist newsletter, The Hightower
Lowdown. OtherWords.org.