When Hugh Hewitt is bad, he'll put you to sleep. Sometimes, his plugs for Disneyland, his chats with the interminably boring and smug RINO John Campbell are like popping a half bottle of Sominex or Lunesta, and, although, I am a devout Christian, I want red meat politics in my drive time. (Oh, I am gonna get mail for this.) Sometimes I want to reach through the speaker, grab Hewitt by the neck and pull him into the passenger seat of the Warplanner LAV -- my Olive Drab 2000 Jeep Cherokee, so I can smack some sense into him and tell him to stoke the fire in his belly.
But when Hugh is on fire he's, well, on fire.
I was reviewing/catching up on some past downloaded podcasts from his
Hughniverse pay content outlet. (You Google it; I ain't wasting time promoting Hewitt's business until he plugs this blog or
The War Planner.) and I came upon
an interview he did several days ago with Bernie Marcus, the co-founder and CEO of Home Depot. Here is an excerpt:
HH: Let me ask you, Bernie Marcus, people will be very interested in this, do you think we can turn this around? Can this economy go back to the era of growth that Home Depot experienced in the 80s and 90s? Is that possible again?
BM: Listen, the American people are very resilient, unlike other people in the world. We just have to get out of their way. We just have to allow them to grow. And if we don’t do that, and we can’t keep putting in impediments. Look, I know so many small business people today. Nobody wants to expand. They’re not willing to expand today. There’s such uncertainty out there. You have a group of people in Washington today, where they’re the bad guys. I mean, if a man has a successful small business, and he’s making $200,000 dollars a year, he’s the enemy of the world.
HH: Yeah. Do you think the President understands this at all, Bernie Marcus?
BM: I…look, look. I’m sure this guy is, I’m sure his head is in the right place. He just doesn’t understand it. He never worked for a day in his life. How would he know it?
HH: Yeah.
BM: He never had to make a payroll, and he has surrounded himself…there’s a statistic that’s very important. They had a statistic on how many businesspeople worked in every administration. The typical one, the smallest one was something like 35% were in the business world. This administration, it’s 8%. He’s surrounded by college professors, he’s surrounded by economic professionals, but nobody has ever created a job in this administration.
I listened to the whole thing and came away with feeling that (1) this guy has his head screwed on right and (2) I will take my business to Home Depot
whenever there is a choice. Fortunately, both of these feelings are easy to honor. Basically, Bernie is one of us: pro-business, thinks The Pantload and his Clown Troupe are economically ignorant turds, and spares no words when ripping them a new one. Also, the only hardware store close by me is an OSH that I
hate patronizing because I seem to annoy the help whenever I purchase anything there.
(By the way, a former business owner for whom I wrote software, sold her company and went to work for Home Depot. The stories she told me about working there lead me to believe that Bernie has his employees practice what he preaches. For example, do you know that if you ask a salesperson where to find a product, it's policy that they practically drop everything and take you to where the item is stocked; they also stay with you until you have pretty much made up your mind to purchase. I have experienced this most of the time I am in the store; only when they have customers crawling all over the place, do they seem to deviate from that, but it is understandable and it is nowhere near the sheer animosity I experience a OSH.)
Anyway, I am glad I discovered Bernie Marcus; color me now a big fan!
"..um, fans, they're over on aisle 12 towards the back. Here, I'll take you.."
-30-
