Last night I stopped off at the launch party of the Peter G. Peterson Foundation at the Council on Foreign Relations (where Peterson was chairman of the board for 22 years). I was underdressed (no tie), plus Thursday night is date night with Mrs. Curious Capitalist so I didn’t want to stick around long, so I hung back outside the packed room where Peterson and his top hired hand, former Comptroller General David Walker, held court.
There I was witness to a remarkable parade of latecomers: There’s Leonard Lauder! There’s Tina Brown and her husband Harold Evans (he’s tiny, which must mean he’s really smart and capable because we all know the world discriminates in favor of the tall)! There’s Tim Geithner (which I took to be a really good sign, because if Lehman or Fannie or Freddie really were about to collapse, he’d still be at the office)! There’s Fareed Zakaria, wading into the crowd and coming back out with Richard Holbrooke in tow! Not to mention early-leaver Bob Rubin, who was headed out of the building as I went in. And the hundreds of people inside the room whom I never got a good look at.
In short, Peterson seemed to have dragged all of Establishment New York out for his foundation’s coming-out party. And more power to him. After taking in $1.9 billion from investors here and overseas when Blackstone Group, which he co-founded, went public last year, he now plans to spend about $1 billion trying to convince Americans to wean their government and themselves from mortgaging their future to investors here and, in particular, overseas. “We’re a startup, although we’re an adequately capitalized startup,” is how Walker, the president of the foundation, put it. Peterson called it “a special interest for the general interest.”
Peterson is a Republican; he was Commerce Secretary in the Nixon Administration. But for the past two decades he has been battling his party’s newfound love affair with chronic budget deficits. He co-founded the deficit-hating Concord Coalition together with Democrat Paul Tsongas and Republican Warren Rudman in 1992. And he’s no fan at all of the current administration’s taxing and spending policies. “Today we’ve done LBJ one better,” he said last night. “We want guns, butter and tax cuts.”
It’s a sentiment I generally agree with. I’m a little bit troubled by the whole guy-who-benefited-from-a-tax-loophole-lecturing-us-about-fiscal-discipline thing, and the fact that we seemingly need billionaires to bankroll our “grassroots” movements these days. But there are far worse things the man could have spent his $1 billion on.