Show Greenspan the Door, and Hello Santa

He is an immensely powerful man, especially these days, when tens of millions want to get his ear, and in turn to hear what he has to tell them.

Wall Street has named its seasonal rally hopes after him.

His TV-Q is the highest, way more than twice that of your average public figure.

He knows the economy from the bottom up -- as employer, manufacturer, marketer and philanthropist.

The country needs him. The world needs him.

Dump Alan Greenspan. Hire Santa.

I know Greenspan has said he’ll lay down his Fed chairmanship in 2006, but that’s not soon enough. Now is the time to hand the economy into the care of someone who understands it intimately.

Santa being unavailable for interviews until Dec. 26, I consulted a couple of his surrogates in the field. I wanted to find out the kind of data that they’re able to collect and pass along to the boss, who wants to hear every single wish but listens with special attention to those whose lives and labors make up this vast and struggling economy -- the tired, the poor, the outsourced-unemployed, who have been getting it in the made-in-China shorts.

From inside his scarlet suit, David Groves -- master magician most of the time, Santa stand-in for the high season -- can get a pretty good fix on the economy, starting with low Santa-hiring rates.

“We suspect,” he says, sounding as if he already held chair at the Council of Economic Advisors, “a cumulative effect of several years of recession and corporations cutting down on their costs and people being worried about their jobs and about having extra money.”

When there is Santa work, a December day may take Groves -- as one did not long ago -- from a catered gig at a millionaire’s home above Mandeville Canyon to East Los Angeles, two little houses, one in back of the other, crammed with kids, a drive-by shooting out in front the night before, and the children asking for a truck or a Barbie -- “not a brand-name truck or a Malibu Barbie, nothing fancy.”

For contrast, Santa David reminds himself of the trio of siblings who gave him a computer printout of “gimmes,” practically down to the bar codes, and wrote menacingly at the bottom, “give them or else.” What a precise parallel to the real Bush economy: Their parents, already loaded, keep getting more and more from the White House, and the poor, their expectations already clobbered, are meekly grateful for generic Christmas stockings or healthcare or any little scrap the administration deigns to throw their way.

Children’s entertainer Chuck Griffith, Santa Chuck, heard more of this in East Los Angeles last Sunday, enthroned on a dais made of Coca-Cola 12-packs. A boy asked him for a house to live in. A girl just wanted her father to come back safely from the hospital. “They don’t want anything extravagant, they don’t expect Santa to come through with a car or a mansion.”

He thinks the requests may be modest and humble because they hear their parents say so often, “ ‘Well, we can’t afford this,’ and even in front of the guy who can make things happen, with the grand poobah of toys right there, [they understand] there may still be limits.”

Greenspan could field 10,000 economists and their data wouldn’t be nearly as good as the data gathered by this bearded red army.

Seventeen years at the top of the Fed is long enough. You start to lose perspective when the only people you look out and see are those who are also perched at the top. You begin to forget that there is a bottom, much less what it’s like.

Consider: Greenspan’s intellectual guru: Ayn Rand. Santa’s: St. Nicholas.

Greenspan’s holiday hangout: the Bohemian Grove. Santa’s: He never stops working for you.

Greenspan’s cold-weather haunt: Davos, Switzerland. Santa’s: the North Pole, what’s left of it with global warming and all.

And Santa knows -- really knows -- who’s naughty and who’s nice. Even if Greenspan knows, he sure isn’t telling the rest of us.