I’ve been planning to write a post in defense of my friend Leo Hindery, who has been a friendly-fire casualty of the Daschle mess.  But Ezra Klein beat me to it:

So who is Hindery? In short, he’s a progressive rich guy. He made hundreds of million in telecommunications, then founded a sports network, then ran a public equity firm. In recent years, he’s become a rare creature in progressive politics: A very rich, very vocal, labor-liberal.

He was a senior economic policy adviser to John Edwards and, when he endorsed Barack Obama, he said he was doing so because Barack Obama “believes in all workers having an easy and unrestricted ability to join a union, including part-time and contract workers…in fairer and more progressive individual income taxation…[because] at the core of his Campaign and its economic policies are his abiding commitments to working men and women and to economic fairness.”

This is not the sort of rhetoric you tend to hear from wildly successful corporate executives. But it’s the sort of rhetoric you wish you heard from wildly successful corporate executives. More to the point, it’s surely not the sort of rhetoric you’re going to hear from Secretary Gregg. Frankly, on this one, Daschle was right.

That pretty much covers it.  It has pissed me off to no end that many progressives have taken cheap shots at Hindery just because he happens to have been successful.  I know it’s easy right know to hate rich people — God knows that the vast majority of them, particularly those running our corporations and our financial institutions are absolutely worthy of such scorn — but there are still a few out there who are both a) rich and b) decent.  (Bill Gates, white courtesy phone please).

Leo is one of those.  He’s a terrific guy, personally decent and always interested in what others have to say.  My conversations with him have always covered a wide range of topics, and I think he’d be an asset to the Obama Administration.  He also happens to be one of the few corporate executives who understands that you have to build companies by giving workers a genuine stake in the company’s success, including decent wages and real benefits.

If you have the time, go read his book from a couple of years ago, It Takes a CEO, in which, among other things, he highlights all the ways our government was failing to protect workers in order to benefit corporations and the rich.  As he puts it succinctly, “tax cuts for the rich only benefit rich people.”  He also eviscerates Wall-Mart by demonstrating that Costco provides real benefits to its employees yet still manages to bring in higher earnings per store.  As Ezra says, this is exactly the kind of things that we all wish more corporate executives not only would say, but would do.

And for the record, neither I nor any organization with which I’ve worked has ever received a dime from Leo.

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