April 27, 2008	Sunday	Rabi-us-Sani 20, 1429

WASHINGTON: Scorching rhetoric and negative campaigning aren’t confined to the long American presidential contest. They are spilling over into other segments of public life.

Retired corporate chieftains are grousing about their successors. Ex-Federal Reserve chairmen are second-guessing steps taken by the current Fed chief. And President George W. Bush is being nipped at by two former presidents.

It is an upending of tradition. Former presidents didn’t publicly challenge the policies of sitting ones. Former Fed chairmen were seldom seen or heard. And retired CEOs were usually just that, retired, and spotted on the golf course, not on CNBC.

But in recent days:

- Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke’s unorthodox moves to keep the housing crisis from spreading drew pointed comments about the crisis from predecessors Paul Volcker and Alan Greenspan.

- General Electric Chief Executive Jeffrey Immelt found himself suddenly on the defensive after he was hammered on an earnings miss. Among his sharpest critics: former GE boss Jack Welch, who said Immelt had a “credibility problem.”

- And if Bush didn’t face enough challenges with two wars and a slumping economy, he’s being buffeted almost daily by Bill Clinton on the political front and Jimmy Carter on Middle East policy.

“It’s partly this environment where we can’t let things slide,” said Wayne Fields, director of the American Cultural Studies programme at Washington University in St. Louis.

Nearly all of those in public life have learned the lessons of the campaign trail, “that we’ve got to say what’s wrong early and get it corrected. We’ve got to declare ourselves,” said Fields. Plus, he added. “There’s big bucks to be made. These former leaders are going to protect their positions of expertise so they can keep selling books and keep getting speaking engagements.”

Greenspan, Clinton, Carter and Welch all have books to sell.

Paul C. Light, professor of public service at New York University, said he does not know whether the coarseness of rhetoric had its origins in the political world or is just a growing factor across the board.

“A lot of the coarseness is driven by the 24-hour news cycle and the fact that there’s a lot of money to be made in controversy.

“You don’t get speaking engagements for being nice. Nobody pays you $500,000 to be gentle.”

The net result of the backbiting and potshots reduces public confidence in leaders and “undermines the ability to govern,” Light said.

Carter has been meeting on his own with members of Hamas, the Palestinian faction that controls the Gaza Strip. The sessions caused grief at the State Department and the White House, where they were seen as sending a mixed message and undermining Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.

Then there is former President Bill Clinton, out on the campaign trail in constant motion, campaigning for his wife, but sometimes seeming to be working at cross purposes with her.

Hillary Rodham Clinton’s victory in the Pennsylvania primary last week extends the activity of both Clintons.

In the past, when presidents retired, “they were really retired. There was a ‘president’s club’ and they understood the problems of the current president and didn’t want to muscle in unless asked,” said Stephen Hess, a presidential scholar who served in the Eisenhower and Nixon administrations.

Hess noted that, with Carter, it is nothing new. His solo foreign-policy forays have bedevilled nearly every president who served after him, including Clinton.

He said Clinton for the most part refrained from criticising Bush — until his wife’s campaign heated up.

Fed chief Bernanke was widely praised earlier this month when he helped avert a financial train wreck by arranging for the rescue of investment bank Bear Stearns and making the equivalent of $400 billion available in emergency loans to banks and non-banks.

But his actions — the most-aggressive expansion of the Fed’s power in its 95-year history — has since drawn sharp comments by both Greenspan and Volcker.

Volcker, the inflation-fighting Fed chairman from 1979 to 1987, said in a speech in New York that the Fed under Bernanke was working “at the very edge” of its legal authority. Volcker also criticised regulators in Greenspan’s era who he said allowed the subprime mortgage mess to become “the mother of all crises.”

For his part, Greenspan bristles at suggestions that he was to blame for the housing bubble by keeping interest rates too low for too long and failing to crack down on sub-prime lending.

He argues that it’s nearly impossible to spot a bubble before it bursts, and that recent moves by the Fed show how hard it is to counter a downward spiral once it begins.

Welch, the former GE president, criticised Immelt, his own hand-picked successor, for a “screw-up” in promising a certain level of earnings and missing the target three weeks later. “Jeff has a credibility issue,” Welch said on CNBC, a cable network owned by GE.

Critiques of present decisions are routinely being delivered across the board from retired government servants.

Retired military generals routinely show up as military analysts on cable TV. And Karl Rove, the mastermind of Bush’s 2000 and 2004 victories, is now offering unsolicited advice to Republicans and Democrats alike.

Obama is “near victory in the Democratic contest, but it is time for him to reset, freshen his message and say something new,” Rove wrote in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal.

“Maybe the harshness of politics has spread to other realms,” said Larry Sabato, a University of Virginia political scientist. “I guess you could say it’s open season on anybody in public life.”

—AP