Policy October 9, 2009, 3:03PM EST

U.S. Chamber's Donohue Shrugs Off Defections

(page 4 of 4)

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One last thing. You have been crisscrossing the country to raise up to $100 million to back a "Campaign for Free Enterprise," which you will launch on October 14th. Some people have seen it as something of a declaration of war on the Democratic priorities. Why do you feel such a campaign is needed, and what will it focus on?

First of all, it's not a declaration of war against anyone. The issue is very, very clear. This is going to be very positive program. We are going to remind, promote, educate and encourage in every way we can so that people remember, or learn, what made the greatest economy in the history of the world—[what] created more jobs, created more wealth, created more innovation, created more opportunity—was a free-enterprise economy with free and open trade with open capital markets, with the right to fail and fall right on your face and get up and try it over again, the right to make money, and the right to make it in a system with moderate regulation and taxes.

And we are doing this [because] we have just gone through the most significant recession since the Great Depression. As we as a society, business and labor and government and the private sector and the public sector, look for ways to assure that these problems don't happen again—although they will in some other context because that's the cycle of economies, We are trying to remind people that there is a way forward, based on our history.

For example, part of this is the trade material we put out a couple of weeks ago. And what did we say? We as a nation have to figure out a way to get out of the recession and create 20 million jobs in less than 10 years and deal with a growing deficit. And how do you do that? We are the largest exporter in the world. You double your exports every five years. And by the way, in the last five years, with one year of recession, exports went up 78%. And if you do that again and again over a number of years, you're going to create a hell of a lot of jobs. So this is a positive thing.

Much of it does seem to focused on wanting to limit regulation, limit government, limit taxation at a time when there is obviously a lot of discussion in Washington about whether more reforms or regulations are needed to prevent many of the excesses we've seen in the last year.

Well, if the shoe fits, whoever owns the shoe ought to wear it.

Where do you think that's a problem?

Come on. Read the headline on the book that you represent. We're going to do a whole redo of the capital markets. And there are good people to work with on that. But maybe while we're doing that, let's ask some fundamental questions, let's make sure that while we do this, we can still drive the capital markets and create wealth. Get the lending going. These are good things. We just have a style here, we say why don't we look at this—are we getting too far from it, too close to it? I think it will be helpful. But we're not going to attack anybody.