Bill Brandon is answering a lot of questions about his good friend Bill Clinton these days.
The new president of the American Bankers Association explains patiently that, officially, the ABA-which has been called one of the six most effective lobbying groups in Washington by the Kiplinger Newsletter-is non-partisan.
He also takes pains, however, to be personally reassuring about his fellow Arkansan.
”You know Clinton in Arkansas has always been pro-business,” said Brandon in the unhurried, honeyed drawl of the Deep South. ”Banking is a business. He`s been pro-banking. He`s been pro-anything that created jobs and helped people help themselves. He won`t change that.”
It is hard to judge how persuasive Brandon`s comments are to other businessmen-particularly fellow bankers, a group generally disillusioned with politicians.
”Why did George Bush abandon the conservatives and the business community in the last three years?” demanded a banker of Republican political consultant Roger Ailes, who was a guest speaker at the recent ABA annual gathering in Boston.
”If God had wanted me to vote, he`d have given me a candidate,”
declared another disgruntled banker on the ABA`s convention floor.
But if many bankers are unhappy with Bush, as a group they appear to distrust Clinton even more. At the convention, it was clear many fear his policies will send the economy into an inflationary tailspin like the one that gripped the country under President Jimmy Carter.
So if the Arkansas governor wins Tuesday, one of the few consolations bankers will have is the knowledge that the president of their biggest lobbying group at least knows, and has worked with, the man in the White House, a place where bankers say they need a friend.
”I think if the next president is from (Brandon`s) home state, it will be helpful because it`s someone (Clinton) knows and has worked with,” said Donald Ogilvie, the ABA`s executive vice president.
It is entirely coincidental that the president of the ABA and a potential president of the United States are from the same small state. The challenges of the two jobs, however, are not entirely dissimilar.
Despite its reputation for effective lobbying in Washington, the banking industry has been unable to win much of what it wants in recent years. One reason, agree many observers, is intra-industry squabbles that pit the differing priorities of increasingly powerful, big banks against the interests of smaller, but more numerous, community banks.
The result: political turf skirmishes, if not wars, in which nobody gets what they most want, a reduction in government-imposed regulations. President Bush did sign a bill Thursday that softened a few proposed regulations, including one that would have established guidelines for executive pay at banks, but the industry believes more relief is needed.
So Brandon, not unlike a presidential candidate, is making a call for unity. His top priority is to get more bankers, bank personnel and customers to push the next administration-whoever leads it-and the next Congress for support.
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”We have to resell ourselves as good people who know how to do our job for the good of our communities,” he said. ”It`s going to take a mess of effort in all 50 states to change the attitude that appears to prevail in both Congress and, to some degree, in the minds of the press.”
Again, like his fellow Arkansan during his campaign, one of Brandon`s biggest challenges will be building a coalition of competitors. Bill Brandon has faced such consensus building before, and believes he can succeed.
William H. Brandon Jr., 60, is president of the First National Bank of Phillips County in Helena, Ark. First National is a small community bank with assets of $95 million, one of several banks in a town of less than 10,000 people in the flood plain of the Mississippi River.
The bank operates in a region of great natural beauty, agricultural history, conservative traditions and grinding poverty-circumstances which have forced the savvy and well-connected Brandon to try coalition strategies on a local scale.
He was among those who worked for 20 years to help get federal funding for a ”slack water” harbor, perpendicular to the flow of a river, and the site of a hoped-for industrial development. Several years ago, the executive joined with officials of competing banks, state and federal agencies to renovate an old train depot into the Delta Cultural Center.
”In my hometown, there are three banks, and I would say in the late 1970s and early `80s we spent our time trying to tear the other one down,”
said Brandon. ”We decided to change that about seven years ago and now we`re doing things like putting together a consortium to work with a public entity
(the Department of Housing and Urban Development) to try to rehab some old fallin`-down buildings that are still structurally sound for elderly people.” For the senior housing project, the banking consortium invited the Elk Horn Bank, Arkadelphia, Ark., to join it. Elk Horn is a community development bank-a sister institution to Chicago`s South Shore Bank, which Clinton has praised both in Arkansas and now around the nation as a model for community redevelopment.
One of the most remarkable aspects of the Helena coalition, says former Chicagoan George Surgeon, president of Elk Horn, is ”they have really started to put together an interracial group,” which he calls ”very unusual” in eastern Arkansas.
”We asked them to work with us because they have some expertise that we didn`t have,” Brandon said. ”It would be like me trying to make a huge loan to AT&T. I just don`t have the expertise to do it. I don`t know what`s good, what`s bad.
”Low-income housing is a different type of thing, different type clientele, different type of credit records, different type attitude. Now South Shore has done that for years and done it very successfully, so we asked them to work with us on these kinds of projects and bring that expertise to us.”
Despite the alliance, Brandon says he sees no need for an additional 100 community development banks, something Clinton has been advocating.
”I have strong feelings on it personally,” he told a press conference at the ABA. ”If you`ve got an existing banking system, which you do, why build another?”
Although Brandon is past chairman of the Arkansas Economic Development Commission and a former member of the Governor`s Advisory Committee on Economic Development, he says he has no inside knowledge of who might lead any Clinton economic team.
”Clinton is very, very bright,” he said. ”He knows enough to surround himself with good people.
”I`m not privy to that,” he said of the details of the candidate`s plans. ”All I really tell Bill Clinton is, if he were to win, he needs to keep his mind open and let bankers from all over the country come and talk to him about where the real world is and what is really good for the country.
”As far as I`m concerned, he`s agreed to do that.”