You Only Thought You Were Republican

by Andrew Tobias (MBA '72)

 "When CEOs make 500 times what their employees make, there is an upper class."

So there I am moderating last fall's 35th Reunion panel, "Two Steves and a Joe," with classmates Steve Schwarzman (estimated net worth, $15 billion), Joe Perella (estimated net worth, $20 billion), and Steve Gilbert (estimated net worth even higher, in undisclosed currencies) — which are not really their net worths, but that's how I feel sitting there amongst them, technically "the moderator," but truly "the rounding error."

I am doing this partly to learn stuff from them myself — these are three smart, smart guys, whose opinions on the state of the world are noteworthy — but mainly because I am hoping to get each of them, and all those in front of us in Aldrich 112, to give me $28,500 for the Democratic National Committee, by whom I have for the last nine years been paid $1 a year to serve as treasurer.

And I am doing that because — as I will argue on this page — we HBS alums are by now almost all Democrats. (Moderate Dems to be sure, but Democrats.) Some of us (very possibly you, dear reader) just don't know it.

Your political views are . . . here . . . about where Mike Bloomberg's are, say, or Nelson Rockefeller's were. No? And they have stayed here (the sensible, enlightened, capitalist center) in a consistent, principled way.

What's happened since my classmates and I left HBS in 1972 is that the political landscape has shifted dramatically to the right.

We Democrats have come to you. You were right all along. From being a left-wing-dominated party, we have become a centrist-dominated party.

OK, maybe we remain one or two clicks to the left of you, but still pretty darn close. (And, yes, a lot of us agree the teachers' unions have too strong a grip.)

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