Pulling from AIG's Playbook

Chapter 21 in our book of PR don'ts:

Go to Washington with your hat out, asking for taxpayer loans, by way of your lavishly expensive corporate jets:

There are 24 daily nonstop flights from Detroit to the Washington area. Richard Wagoner, Alan Mulally and Robert Nardelli probably should have taken one of them.

Instead, the chief executives of the Big Three automakers opted to fly their company jets to the capital for their hearings this week before the Senate and House -- an ill-timed display of corporate excess for a trio of executives begging for an additional $25 billion from the public trough this week.

Yes, yes. They will protest that this is how business gets done at the C level of Fortune 100 companies. To which, many will respond, "Yeah, we get it...and that's the problem."

From a public relations standpoint, appearances are everything. (Well, most everything.)