Obama echoes idea of Addison guy who saw Jesus in door

Facing tough times, new President Barack Obama has drawn from old presidents in the rush to fix the nation's present woes.

An admirer of Abraham Lincoln, Obama embraces some of the philosophies implemented by his predecessor from Illinois. Obama's Cabinet boasts leaders from the Bill Clinton era as well as holdovers from the George W. Bush administration. Then there are the economic stimulus plans that draw comparisons to Franklin D. Roosevelt.

But the president's latest proposal announced Wednesday is right out of the economic playbook of former presidential candidate Ed Gombos - a T-shirt maker in Addison who launched a failed 1996 bid for the White House after he saw the face of Jesus Christ in the wood grain of his closet door.

Calling it "basic, common sense," Obama proposed a cap of $500,000 in compensations for executives at companies getting taxpayer bailouts.

Gombos was lugging around his door and pushing the idea of "a maximum wage to counter our minimum wage" back in 1988.

"I don't know how it came to me, other than it was common sense," the 71-year-old Gombos recalls Wednesday, sounding downright presidential.

You might not remember Gombos, as he did fall 47,402,358 votes short of winning the White House during his quixotic presidential campaign. But I do.

I wrote several columns in the 1990s about Gombos, who has stayed in touch since then. He was, as he admits, "looked upon as a kook or whatever." But he had an almost Forrest Gump-like ability to come up with ideas that don't seem that kooky when they come from Obama.

"I still have the door, and people who hear about it sometimes come in to see it," says Gombos, who took a self-imposed vow of poverty long ago and still sells $5 T-shirts to local schools and youth groups. He also has the more than 30,000 pages of essays and ideas he wrote and filed in his office between 1988 and 1996.

"Thoughts come to me much as an itch comes to some people," Gombos said at the time. He figures he passed out and mailed a half-million copies of his various essays on everything from his "maximum wage" concept to his "Bill of Responsibilities" to the idea that presidential elections should be like the NCAA basketball tourney, with every community offering a candidate who would face off in regional contests until we end up with the top two candidates facing off in the presidential finals.

He planted his "maximum wage" idea in 1988, but it never took root among the thousands of people who received his essay.

"It's almost like God gave me a bow, but no arrows," Gombos said back in 1996.

He doubts he had any influence, but he was excited a year after his first economic essay when he saw a cartoon in The New Yorker that featured two rich club members saying, "I don't care what they do with the minimum wage, but I want them to keep their hands off the maximum wage."

Even now, Gombos realizes he's not a policymaker for the new administration.

"I wrote to Obama in April of this year, and I got a letter back, sort of a 'Dear Ed.' The first two paragraphs thanked me for writing and the rest was just a form letter," Gombos says.

Obama has preached responsibility and sacrifice, hitting on some of the themes Gombos wrote into his "Bill of Responsibilities," which urged people to "be productive, consume less than you produce, share overage with the less-fortunate, and inflict no harm."

Concerned about the financial inequities in our nation, Gombos penned an essay on July 24, 1992, titled "The Two Economies."

I doubt if anybody in Washington read it, but if Obama comes out with a plan to print blue money for food and labor and red money for "paper profiting," "entertainment" and "nonessential goods," you'll know who had the idea first.