President Obama, who swept to the White House on a message of hope and inspiration, is struggling to contend with a different emotion among Americans – anger.
Livid about their own vanished jobs and decimated retirement accounts, people across the country are being subjected to story after story about the excesses of the wealthy: the $18 billion paid out in Wall Street bonuses last year, the $35,000 chest of drawers for the Merrill Lynch chief executive’s office, the planned Wells Fargo retreat in Las Vegas. This week, they got a new target: an Obama Cabinet nominee who had earned millions and failed to pay all of his taxes.
"I think everybody needs to be held to task right now," said Keith Igoe, 46, a roofer in suburban Denver who was an Obama campaign volunteer. Referring to Thomas A. Daschle, who stepped aside Tuesday as Obama’s nominee for health and human services secretary and White House health policy czar, Igoe said: "I don’t know I’d hold him any less accountable than anybody else."
Obama has searched for the right tone for taking the transgressors to task while not crossing into glib point-scoring that could spook the business class. And his indignation has ratcheted upward in recent weeks. He made passing mention at his inauguration of "greed and irresponsibility," then declared last week that the Wall Street bonuses were "shameful"…
My comments aren’t about the thread of this article but on its take on emotional life. In practice, the opposite of hope is not despair. It’s envy. When I first read that years ago it made no sense to me. The person writing about it was Melanie Klein, a Hungarian Psychoanalyst who spent her professional career in England. She said a lot of things that I didn’t understand back then, but as time went on, more and more of them made sense – and this one had the ring of brilliance.Envy is the most painful of emotions because it’s insoluable. The person that you envy stands before you as a beacon of what is most desirable, yet something you can never be. Jealousy can drive one forward, because what you want is what the other person has, so you set about to try to have it. Not so with envy. There’s no hope of ever being what the envied person is. The only way to not feel envy is to destroy the other person, either symbolically or in fact. 
The famous play/movie, Amadeus, about another composer’s envy of Mozart is an example, as is the case of John Lennon’s assassination.
And the day before his "shameful" comments, Obama met with 13 chief executives and offered no scolding. "We really didn’t get off into any side things about car company guys taking jets or stuff like that," said Michael R. Splinter, chief executive of Applied Materials in Silicon Valley. "Because he knows that, you know, we’re all working hard to improve our companies, and if we improve our companies, it will be a big part of the economy improving. A lot of the GDP was represented in the room today."In Manhattan, opinions are divided about Obama’s gradual shift to tougher rhetoric. Manish Vora, 29, who left his lucrative Wall Street job last year to launch a networking service for artists, said Obama’s language resonates with younger bankers who have developed misgivings about their business, with its 80-hour workweeks and eye-popping bonuses.
"There’s always been this kind of dissatisfaction with the job, even though people were getting paid a lot – this sense from young people that it was kind of absurd," Vora said. "Most people are thinking that the rage, the anger against the executives is pretty justified."
But lawyer Robert Schwed, a partner in the corporate practice at WilmerHale, is more skeptical. Schwed attended Obama’s speech at Nasdaq and remembers being struck by its moralistic edge. While Obama’s warnings were prescient, Schwed said, there is some hypocrisy in the "high dudgeon these political leaders are in."
"Obviously, folks on Wall Street tend to have a tin ear from time to time, but I don’t think [the rhetoric] appreciates what the deal is on Wall Street — people make a minimal salary, and the bonus is what it is," he said. "Heaven forbid someone earns $400,000 from a company getting TARP money. Well, maybe leaders in Washington should be paying their taxes?"
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