Mel Karmazin, John Snow and the DC Pander

Mel Karmazin spoke at the National Press Club in Washington today and as you probably heard he talked up a new a la carte plan for Sirius and XM should they merge. Listeners could get as few as 50 stations for $6.99 a month. The move was clearly designed to assuage a concerned Federal Trade Commission which must rule on the proposed merger of Karmazin's Sirius with XM Radio. As Washington panders go, it was pretty good. It offered a tangible consumer benefit to the merger which has drawn the opposition of Consumer's Union and other consumer groups who see it as blatantly anticompetative.

What's interesting is to compare it to John Snow's performance before the press club last week. The former Treasury Secretary and CSX chairman is now Chairmain of Cerberus, the private equity giant poised to buy an 80% stake in Chrysler. I went to Snow's talk and thought he did well enough on some points but poorly on others. He talked about how great it was to have Chrysler back in American hands after its years under German behemoth Daimler Chrysler. (Hey, it's a car company not the Rhineland.) He said Cerberus was in the deal to stay which was meant to assure lawmakers that this was no ordinary strip-and-flip deal. He then went on to make extravagant claims about why private equity is so good for the economy--no concern about quarterly reports and what he called "26-year-old analysts". Snow said he had nothing against the equity markets but....well, basically he made them seem mercurial and goody while PE was the font of sober judgment and long-term thinking. He also went on to decry rising health care costs, which is standard CEO fare, except Snow had several years in Washington and all the administration did was add a huge prescription drug benefit. He also defended Bush's SOcial Security plan--again, saying it hadn't gotten a fair reception from the other side. Hey, it wasn't just Democrats that did in Bush's plan. Republicans did, too. Besides, it's 2007 and there's a new sheriff in town. In the age of Pelosi and Reid do you really want to be relitigating that issue while Congress could make your life much harder? Snow was known for being a gracious guy with a tin ear in Washington, certainly when compared with the likes of market whisperers like Bob Rubin and Hank Paulson. In his DC pander he showed he wasn't their equal--or even Mel Karmazin's.