Outrage? The New York Times tells us that President Obama’s economic team was “on message” delivering the news that $165 million in AIG bonuses to derivatives traders who helped precipitate AIG’s financial hemorrhage, could not legally be blocked.

But the public’s response to the news (“the growing outcry”) caused the President to change tactics, with Treasury Secretary Geithner taking the heat.

There’s nothing particularly unusual in this. The political wind shifts with public sentiment, and the politician (and team) accommodate the reality. A team member may become the fall-guy, but that’s what damage control is all about.

So what or where is the outrage? Emotionally, the pain of our De/Recession is clearly beginning to be felt by the electorate. And AIG, together with Geithner, are its momentary targets (last week we had Madoff). And the pain is an aggregation of personal loss weighed against the perception that those responsible for the loss (“Wall Street”) continue to profit while we (“Main Street”) lose.

This is a simple splitting of a complex picture into good and bad. As we cry out, we forget our benefits during the fat years of our various bubbles and how we profited. They’ve been swept away as surely as the skinny sheaves of wheat in Pharaoh’s dream devoured the healthy sheaves. We were all part of it but we need to rid ourselves of what we believe now to be our bad parts. Perhaps, we believe, it will undo our hurt.

I don’t think so. Change will require deep thought leading to action and reappraisal of that action. Blame is just a crowd pleaser.

However, the radical message sent by President Obama in this tactical change of course may have the provocative heft of a Franklin D. Roosevelt move: it pushes the conventional envelope by declaring that the legal rules (at least governing corporate compensation) must bow to moral and ethical rules, as determined by public opinion (mediated by the Executive).

This is a breath-taking notion suggesting that corporate governance must reckon with genuine “shareholder value” in the sense that the citizenry supporting the corporation must be considered in the corporation’s business calculations. Shareholder value extends then to stakeholders— even those without formal equity positions. Value expands from a narrow profit-based assessment of next quarter’s gain in revenue to a longer term social value reckoning with some idea of fairness.

Of course, we’ll have to wait and see: changes will develop only as they aggregrate. And the hearts and minds of our corporate world have been educated in an MBA model that will only change incrementally. But this time, the political shift makes good sense as a building block in a new foundation of corporate integrity.

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