Goldman Sachs has decided the time to hire an outside public-relations firm to help polish their tarnished image has come, the Post tells us today. This is not because Lloyd Blankfein has lost any faith in the firm’s chief spokesman, Daily Intel icon Lucas Van Praag, but because it’s just not reasonable for Van Praag to be sitting there on the phone all day on his lonesome* fielding questions as varied as “Your is firm appears to have had an outsize role in the financial crisis, the bailout of AIG, the Grecian debt crisis, the subsequent devaluation of the euro, and will likely be the catalyst for the next six to eight global economic crises to come. Discuss.” to “What about the kittens?” to “How many megatons of TNT does your CEO’s nut sack contain, exactly?”
But whom does one hire when faced with such an image problem? To help with the gargantuan task of convincing the public that when this big ol’ vampire squid wraps its tentacles around the face of humanity, it’s merely cuddling?
You need an old hand. Someone who can look entitlement and megalomania and incompetence straight in the face and say, “I can work with this.” To that end, the firm has chosen Public Strategies, a Texas-based PR company headed by Dan Bartlett, the longtime adviser to George W. Bush and before that, Karl Rove. Because if there are two people this century who have had and overcome major image problems, it’s these two guys. (No. What?)
Goldman’s rehab [NYP]
* We know, it’s not just him, but sometimes it feels that way, not to us, to him.
