CEOs and the Fiscal Cliff: What Influence?

One afternoon during the 2012 Democratic convention in Charlotte, a handful of current and former Obama White House officials snuck away to address executives and investors gathered at Wake Forest University’s business school. The meeting was convened by a Democratic group called Business Forward that enlists business leaders to help Washington make policy. Austan Goolsbee, the former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, and Jon Carson, a top White House official, laid out the administration’s approach to the upcoming fiscal cliff and urged the audience to push their local representatives toward a constructive resolution.

Business Forward is funded by more than 40 corporations, including Google, McDonald’s, Dow Chemical, and Wal-Mart Stores, and conducted hundreds of such meetings throughout the country, even bringing executives for briefings at the White House. It was part of a broad campaign by business leaders to apply influence, connections, and money to a political process that many see as dangerously out of control. “The business community engaged at a much more significant level than any time in recent memory,” says former Republican Senator Judd Gregg of New Hampshire. “There was much more aggressive CEO participation than I’ve ever seen before.”