WASHINGTON — Wall Street honcho Ken Langone took President Obama to the woodshed yesterday for acting “unpresidential” and “petulant” by pitting rich and poor Americans against one another during the bruising battle over the debt limit.
“He’s not bringing us together. He’s willfully dividing us. He’s petulant,” said Langone, a former director of the New York Stock Exchange and founder of Home Depot.
“Ronald Reagan would never go into the Oval Office without his jacket on — that’s how much he revered the presidency,” Langone said in a CNBC interview yesterday.
“This guy [Obama] worked like hell to be president . . . Behave like a president. Let me look at you as a model to how we should behave. What does he say? Fat cats, jet airplanes. What is the purpose? Us versus them,” fumed Langone, currently chairman of the investment bank Invemed Associates.
Obama has made higher taxes on wealthy Americans, oil companies and corporate-jet owners a constant refrain in his speeches to the nation during heated negotiations to raise the nation’s $14.3 trillion debt limit.
Although he bristled at Obama’s “fat cat” attacks, Langone said he doesn’t oppose higher taxes on wealthy Americans, or even means-testing Social Security benefits — if the money is used to pay down the crushing federal debt.
“People like me have to understand that it isn’t business as usual,” he said.
“I should not get Social Security. I think it’s a travesty for a man of my success and of my means to get anything from the federal government. I think I should pay more taxes . . . but everything they take from me should go to reduce the debt.”
Langone also warned against continually raising the debt.
“We need to understand as a nation that you can’t forever expect somebody out there, whether it’s China or somebody in England, to say I will always take America’s debt no matter what,” he said.
“We are heading into a dose of reality we’ve never seen before . . . Look at the number of states now laying people off because they can’t print paper [money].”
Langone said he was confident the White House and Congress would resolve the impasse — but that the president had caused other, longer-lasting damage.
“The debt ceiling will be raised . . . by next week,” he said. “They’ll come to some juncture where they’re going to say, ‘This is not what I wanted, but it’s the best I can get.’ ”
But “the destruction he is inflicting by his behavior will carry on long after we have settled the debt limit.”
“Divide us and we all lose. And this has got to stop,” Langone pleaded. “And if he’s listening, or one of his people are listening, and you can quote me exactly for what I say, he is not acting presidential, he is behaving in a way designed, in my opinion, to divide us and make us look at each other with skepticism, with suspicion.
“That’s the end of America as we know it when that happens.”