Hi. I’m Harvey. And I was in the wrong place at the wrong time…
I don’t know if Harvey Pitt has uttered these words in the last few days. But he should … especially if he can find the meeting place of the DC twelve-step group for political appointees who through a mix of cruel fate and poetic justice are about to receive the Washington equivalent of a vicious melvin and a two-minute-plus swirly.
If you’re harboring any doubts about whether the corporate corruption scandal has political legs, take a gander at Mr. Pitt and watch your doubts melt away. As nearly as I can tell Tom Daschle, Nancy Pelosi, John McCain and just about every other politician who can get a reporter on the phone is now calling for Pitt to resign. And even the administration’s defenders are a bit tepid in their defenses.
Pitt is, in a word, toxic — as welcome at your political fundraiser as a handfull of plutonium. He’s the poster boy for the hot political evil of the day. And everyone and their uncle wants to call for his resignation because there’s absolutely no political downside to it.
Got any names of politicians who called 
on Tom White to resign? Nope? I didn’t think so.
Don’t get me wrong. I don’t have much sympathy for Pitt. But the calls for his resignation don’t seem to have much to do with anything he’s actually done. Or at least not anything he’s done since the Senate (if I recall right, unanimously) confirmed him as head of the Securities and Exchange Commission.
The problem for Pitt is that his calling card was the proposition that the SEC was simply too harsh on corporate America and that anti-business busybodies like Pitt’s predecessor Arthur Levitt needed to just give the CEOs a *$%#*%* break and let them get about the business of doing the right thing without so much un-fun big government oversight. Now of course we know that at just the time Pitt was parading these views corporate America was actually becoming a Hieronymus Bosch painting of fraud, skullduggery and 
‘aggressive accounting,’ and that, if anything, the SEC hadn’t done nearly enough to make folks behave.
That of course makes Harvey Pitt into something like the Neville Chamberlain of corporate governance. And when you consider that even Neville Chamberlain wasn’t really quite Neville Chamberlain that’s actually saying quite a lot.
In any case, Pitt is really no better or worse than the entire administration. He’s a pretty good advocate of what was — until a few weeks ago — the administration’s stance on corporate government and oversight. Watching Pitt accuse Arthur Levitt of going too easy on CEO shenanigans is more than a touch comic. But it’s no more a case of ideological cross-dressing than what the president is going to try to pull off tomorrow. He’s just first in line to get the treatment.
