WASHINGTON - With his cherubic face, white apron, and racks of sausage links, a neighborhood butcher would seem an unlikely target of White House ire. But Obama administration officials contend the photograph of a butcher is part of a misleading attack on the president’s plan to prevent another Wall Street meltdown.
The image is being used by the US Chamber of Commerce, one of the most powerful business organizations in the country, as part of an advertising campaign that criticizes President Obama’s proposal for a new consumer protection agency.
Obama says the new arm of government is needed to protect borrowers from the types of risky lending practices that helped trigger the nation’s economic crisis. But Wall Street and other US business groups see the proposed new bureau, which would be called the Consumer Financial Protection Agency, as a heavy-handed government intrusion. They have made it a prime target of their opposition to new regulations.
Enter the butcher.
“The economy has made it tough on this local butcher’s customers, but now Washington wants to make it tougher on everyone,’’ says the Chamber of Commerce ad, which is running online and in Washington-area newspapers as part of a $2 million campaign. It asserts that Obama’s proposals would regulate credit relationships between even the smallest business and their customers.
It is a classic Washington strategy, putting a human face on a complicated issue, such as Harry and Louise, the famous but fictional couple deployed by the insurance industry in 1993 to kill health care reform. Chamber of Commerce spokesman Eric Wohlschlegel said the anonymous “butcher’’ who appears in advertisements is an image taken from a collection of stock photographs. He declined to identity the man in the ad.
“He could be a butcher. That’s not the point,’’ Wohlschlegel said. The goal, he said, is to highlight the chamber’s belief that small businesses would be subjected to unnecessary regulation.
Democrats supporting the new regulations said the ad’s assertion is false, that mom-and-pop stores are not in Washington’s regulatory crosshairs. Nonetheless, in response to the allegation, House sponsors plan to insert new language into a sweeping financial regulation bill that will explicitly exclude small-business credit relationships from any new rules.
Obama’s economic adviser, former Harvard …
Read the original article at Boston
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