OBAMA FINDS AN ALLY IN WAL-MART, WHOSE STORES HE ONCE SHUNNED, Bloomberg notes. And since it’s Bloomberg, it’s worth adding the “Unexpectedly!” — or as Scott Lincicome of the Cato Institute tweets, Bloomberg’s article is “A classic of the ‘corporatism, how does it work?’ genre:”
As a freshman senator with his eye on the presidency, Barack Obama said he’d never shop at a Wal-Mart and held the company up as an emblem of corporate greed.
Today, Wal-Mart Stores Inc. is one of Obama’s most reliable corporate allies, a go-to partner that’s backed the White House on more than a dozen business initiatives, particularly Obamacare and climate change.
And speaking of “unexpectedly,” a flashback to 2011, when Wal-Mart went ‘Back to Basics’, which Richard Pollock, then with PJM dubbed “A Cautionary Tale for the Left:”
The failure, in large part, can be pinned to Leslie Dach: a well-known progressive and former senior aide to Vice President Al Gore. In July 2006, Dach was installed as the public relations chief for Wal-Mart. He drafted a number of other progressives into the company, seeking to change the company’s way of doing business: its culture, its politics, and most importantly its products.
Out went drab, inexpensive merchandise so dear to low-income Americans. In came upscale organic foods, “green” products, trendy jeans, and political correctness. In other words, Dach sought to expose poor working Americans to the “good life” of the wealthy, environmentally conscious Prius driver.
Dach’s failure should be a cautionary tale for President Obama: last week he scolded a blue collar man in Pennsylvania for driving an SUV, and he has previously admonished Americans to get out of their gas-guzzlers and into electric cars. Dach’s failure should also put Michelle Obama on notice; she has been pushing her White House organic vegetable garden as a model for working Americans.
Like other real-world experiments, the Wal-Mart story exposes the failure of progressivism in the marketplace, as the Dach strategy has been a fiasco: the merchandising turned off low-income (and largely Democratic-leaning) customers. Says former Wal-Mart executive Jimmy Wright:
The basic Wal-Mart customer didn’t leave Wal-Mart. What happened is that Wal-Mart left the customer.
First being in bed with Hillary, then Al Gore, then Obama. I’m not sure how those associations help Wal-Mart stay focused on its core business, but I guess it’s worth it for the cocktail parties and the protection from what Michael Walsh has described as a criminal organization masquerading as a political party.