Richie Sexson was a first baseman for the Seattle Mariners, earning $50 million over four years. In 2007, he hit barely .200 for the season and struck out more times than all but a handful of players. It’s possible that never in the history of the game had so much been paid for so little production.

At first, fans didn’t seem to care what Richie was getting, so long as he swatted enough homers among his strikeouts. But during his freefall, that $8 hot dog and $10 beer did not go down so easily. He was booed out of the game in ever-polite Seattle.

As it turns out, there’s a performance clause in class resentment.

And when home-office hobbyists could flip a tract house every six months and walk away with a sweat-free windfall, no one would have minded if, say, Countrywide Financial was paying exotic dancers to sort the M&Ms on board the corporate jet of its chief executive officer, Angelo Mozilo. But after Countrywide collapsed, and more than 12,000 people lost their jobs and many more lost their life savings, Mozilo was a pariah. How could he stand to make $110 million in total severance (later reduced) after driving the nation’s largest home lender into the ground?



Class resentment, like race, is always there in American life, though oft-smothered by the surface calm of good times. It was considered unfashionable, or worse, to point out that by 2006 total compensation for C.E.O.s of the largest companies was 364 times that of the pay of the average worker – a nearly tenfold increase in the gap over 30 years.

Oh shush, the apologists for inequality always said – America is a meritocracy, we pay for the best, and the rewards are market-driven.

As it turns out, there’s a performance clause in class resentment. To fail and still walk away with a killing is a break in the social contract simply because it doesn’t work that way in real life for most people.

All of which is to say that President Obama should have little trouble prevailing with his announcement Wednesday that the buffet table at the loser’s banquet has been closed. He set a salary cap of $500,000 for executives at companies that receive large amounts of bailout money.

The restrictions do not go as far as those proposed by Missouri Democratic Senator Claire McCaskill, but it’s a start, and the national mood is with him. Polls show bipartisan resentment at the lords of finance who expect continued gilded age rewards after ruining the economy of the Western world.

“People really hate you,” Representative Barney Frank said of his message to bankers. “And they’re starting to hate us because we hang out with you.”

Obama was more nuanced, but his words on Wednesday showed a continued fleshing out of his theme that the party is over for those at top, as it has been at the bottom for some time.

“This is America. We don’t disparage wealth,” Obama said. What Americans won’t stand for, he said, are “executives being rewarded for failure,” especially when the taxpayers are doing the rewarding.

It would have been more difficult for Obama to channel the century-old outrage of Teddy Roosevelt had he not ditched Tom Daschle, his rules-challenged nominee for health czar. Daschle, with his $5 million in influence-peddling income and surprise at having to pay taxes on a limo and driver, is road kill on the way to the kind of common sense governance that Obama promised to bring to Washington.

Daschle’s circle of sympathy goes no further than K Street, which if it were based in Omaha would be shut down as a vice problem and public menace. Of course, some people will whine at the cruelty of trying to force welfare-dependent corporate execs to live on half-a-million a year.

“That is pretty Draconian,” said James F. Reda, founder of a compensation consulting firm, who was quoted in a New York Times story about Obama’s restrictions. He said it would be difficult to staff companies forced to accept the limits.

The same argument was made by the Wall Street bonus babies who said that good people would be hard to find if they could not reward them with millions extra every time they crashed 401k portfolios.

They argue that high executive compensation, and the billions in yearly bonuses, are just part of the accepted pay packages of the titans of finance. Fine. That was then. But once a company comes to taxpayers for a handout, it’s time for a paradigm shift, as they say at human resource retreats while plotting layoffs.

I’m going to guess that if top employees of teetering banks aren’t willing to work for reduced pay, there’s a long line of people who would happily take their place. Go ahead – make their day: walk away from the executive chambers.

The pity party meets at first base, the one-time home of strikeout king Richie Sexson.



[Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly named the chief executive of Countrywide Financial. He is Angelo Mozilo, not Anthony.]