Greenspan and the Men's Room in DC

Foremost, the title is meant to be inappropriate. When someone else from Jackson found out I was heading to DC on behalf of TBOR, references to Larry Craig started flying. Pardon me for going for the cheap laugh...

Alan Greenspan, however, is a frail man. He’s old. You’ve seen him on TV, so you know this.

But to stumble out of the men's room at the Marriott in Washington DC and come face-to-face with Greenspan will give you a slightly different perspective. You suddenly accept – or at least I did – that the man is up there in years. For me, this fact about his physical appearance only highlights how exceptional his intellect remains at age 83.

I flew to DC on Monday to attend what I thought would be just-another-real-estate conference. Yep... your dues dollars have been hard at work while, in the past, I and other TBOR Past Presidents have listened to keynote speakers drone on about national issues that don’t always affect the Jackson Hole market. If you’ve ever been to a NAR function or visited with a Realtor from another part of the country for any length of time, you quickly recognize how different we (and most resort markets) are from the rest of America.

I figured this trip to DC would be no different. Show up at the brunches. Let the rest of the Wyoming contingent tease me about being from Jackson. Endure a couple sessions where I nod incessantly at someone from middle America talking about issues I know nothing about, and then fly home 48 hours later.

For this trip to DC, I'm happy to say I was mistaken.

This morning, Day 1, opened with Pat Buchanan (yes, THAT Pat Buchanan) trading barbs with former Tennessee Congressman Harold Ford on the current administration’s first 100-odd days. Pure comedy. In the forum of a CNN or Fox News interview, you might think opponents from across the aisle harbor some genuine resentment as they spar back and forth. While there's surely some personality conflicts in DC, watching Buchanan and Ford today was enlightening. Instead of two guys fighting for sound bites in a 3-minute interview on TV, here were two seasoned veterans with time for foreplay and playful banter between the swing-for-the-fences, haymaker punches commonplace on shows like Hardball.

After today, I think politics has a lot more in common with pro wrestling than a street fight. While clearly opposed on some core issues, Buchanan and Ford both recognize one universal truth: the fight is fixed and a lot of the energy expended in the ring is simply for the entertainment of the audience.

Robert Reich, former Secretary of Labor under Clinton, was next to speak. Again, someone I had become familiar with via CNN proved to be much more substantial than the 30-second sound bites had lead me to believe.

And so went the day. Heavy hitter after heavy hitter spoke to a bunch of dirt pimps from around the country. Their theme, however, was very consistent: more than any other economic segment, real estate has the ability to either bring us out of the current economic meltdown, or to sink us deeper into the financial morass.

Greenspan took the stage after lunch. Following his introduction, he awkwardly remained seated and silent toward the edge of the podium. It became apparent this was not by design and, for a moment, I felt sorry for him as I might my grandfather when caught off guard.

Then, effortlessly, Greenspan began to speak. No ham-handed attempt at humor to break the ice. No immediate inflections in voice to capture the attention of the audience (and this was unfolding in a very large conference room with multiple JumboTron-type displays to broadcast Greenspan’s talk to those in the back of the room).

He spoke with a confidence you don’t get unless you’ve been doing something well for a very long time. He weaved a tapestry of economic history and philosophy as if it were a bedtime story. It fit together like a carefully crafted piece of fiction where the plot is conveniently wrapped up by the final page.

The Q&A session afterward, however, is where my appreciation for the man began to set in. Off the cuff, Greenspan was able to dissect complicated, real estate-based questions from the crowd, wrapping each curve ball up nicely before moving on to the next pitch. One question however – dealing with whether real estate capitalization should be tied to short-term or long-term interest rates (yeah, I know…) – is where the ego and intellect of an 83-year-old man finally bubbled to the surface. I’ll spare you the tirade, but Greenspan’s rant ended simply with “I’m sorry, but they (his dissenters on this particular issue) are wrong.” And on he moved to the next question.

In the end, maybe Greenspan was right on this particular topic. Or maybe he's slightly off the mark and his detractors truly have a clearer view. Frankly, it's irrelevant to the likes of you and me. We're insects in an ant farm encased in glass while Greenspan and others are on the outside looking in and figuring out what they need to do to keep the colony alive.

To see and hear Greenspan in person, and to pick up on the subtle nuance of his -- and others -- intellect, was a special experience. After nearly bumping into the frail man outside a men’s room, I have a deeper appreciation of the current challenges facing the real estate industry, and, moreover, the flesh and blood people trying incredibly hard to right the ship.