I have met Debbie Bosanek. I’ve also met her boss Warren Buffett. But as far as this week’s US political news is concerned, the more important figure is Ms Bosanek, the billionaire investor’s secretary. She’s important because she’s met Barack Obama, who gave her a high-profile spot in the audience for his State of the Union address this week, transforming her into a symbol of tax inequality in America.
Mr Buffett started this, of course. In a New York Times op-ed last August he attacked a system that allows him to pay a lower tax rate than any of the other people in his Omaha office. This has spawned the “Buffett rule”, the benchmark that Barack Obama is using to promise that the richest Americans will not pay tax at a lower rate than their secretaries.
Ms Bosanek is both an obvious and an odd choice to become – as an ABC interviewer put it this week – “the poster woman” for this campaign. Obvious, because she is the gatekeeper for Mr Buffett. Odd, because she is far from a typical secretary (in her polite but terse emails, she actually styles herself, in the modern way, as “Assistant to Warren Buffett”).
I know her, and so do hundreds, perhaps thousands, of journalists, because she’s the person who responds when you inquire about Mr Buffett or Berkshire Hathaway. Usually with some version of “no comment”. She is also the official distributor of the press passes that get reporters into Berkshire’s annual shareholder gathering in Omaha and Mr Buffett’s one scheduled press conference of the year, the day after. A Slate profile from last September contains most of what is known about “Debbie B”, and describes her as “someone designed to tamp down on the news, not to make it“.
Now she’s making news, she’s equally unforthcoming. The full ABC interview runs to 34 minutes, but most of it is with Mr Buffett. As Ms Bosanek says, near the start of the broadcast:
I just feel like an average citizen. Maybe I should say that I was representing the average citizen, who needs a voice and wants to be treated fairly in the area of taxation.
Her new-found prominence has already riled right-wingers. Rush Limbaugh asked listeners on Wednesday:
Does anybody know what Warren Buffett’s secretary does earn? Does anybody know what he really pays her? Where did this whole plastic banana, good-time, phony, rock ‘n’ roll stuff get started anyway? This notion she’s some pauper paying some high tax rate? What does she earn? They never tell us that. It’s a campaign prop.
A few commentators have had a stab at working out her salary. In Forbes, Paul Gregory calculated it could be as much as $500,000 a year, but fellow contributor Josh Barro claims he’s made an error. In the Slate profile, Alice Schroeder – Mr Buffett’s biographer – guesses Ms Bosanek makes less than $100,000 a year, though “Warren does give her some Berkshire stock every year, either on her birthday or on Christmas”. A few commentators are even saying she should release her tax return, Mitt Romney-style.
Two things are clear: 1) judging from the look on her face in the ABC interview, Ms Bosanek would probably like to close the door of her office behind her and return to being her boss’s low-profile watchdog; 2) her day-job as assistant to one of the world’s richest men and her new role as a talisman for Mr Obama’s tax fairness campaign mean that she is as much an “average” secretary as Mr Buffett is an “average” investor.
