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Getbig Main Boards => Politics and Political Issues Board => Topic started by: Soul Crusher on September 21, 2011, 07:20:58 AM
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What a friggin disaster.
http://www.businessinsider.com/obama-white-house-problems-confidence-men-economic-team-geithner-2011-9?op=1
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But Paul Krugman was the voice inside Obama's head
New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, a Noble Prize-winning economist and Summers' rival, was an early and vocal critic of Obama's stimulus plan.
Although he was shunned from the president's economic policy staff, Suskind writes that Krugman occupied an important place in Obama's deliberations about the recovery.
"Each morning at the economic briefing it was like we were debating Krugman," an aide told Suskind. "Clearly Obama was reading Paul's columns and related on materials...and it made sense to him as both analysis and a guide for action."
Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/obama-white-house-problems-confidence-men-economic-team-geithner-2011-9?op=1#ixzz1Yb4gOW00
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In short, Obama is a REALLY terrible manager
Obama allowed himself to be pushed around by his subordinates — Summers and Geithner in particular — and drawn into long policy debates instead of focusing on policy questions.
"The decision he had made in November to choose Geithner and Summers, and his penchant for wanting to convince his advisers of his rightness prior to making a major decision, all but guaranteed that any such market intervention would place him in a position of having to out-debate much of his senior staff," Suskind writes.
Summers put it best, telling Peter Orzag: "You know Peter, we're really home alone. I mean it…We're home alone. There's no adult in charge. Clinton would never have made these mistakes."
Obama all-but-admitted to Suskind that he didn't focus on the big picture for much of his first year, saying: "Carter, Clinton, and I all have sort of the disease of being policy wonks... I think that if you get too consumed with that you lose sight of the larger issue."
Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/obama-white-house-problems-confidence-men-economic-team-geithner-2011-9?op=1#ixzz1Yb6GflrY
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The White House has a SERIOUS women problem
According to the book, top female staffers were marginalized by the boy's club mentality of the Obama White House. "Looking back, this place would be in court for a hostile workplace," former communications director Anita Dunn told Suskind. "Because it actually fit all of the classic legal requirements for a genuinely hostile workplace to women."
As the only woman on the economic team, Romer disproportionately bore the brunt of this hostility. Staffers said Summers' often tried to humiliate Romer in morning briefings — it got so bad that Obama senior advisor Valerie Jarrett had to call meetings for female staffers to air their grievances.
The President was not only complacent, but also responsible for the problem, Suskind notes. During one meeting with a group of economists, Romer wrote a note to Summers: "Either he acknowledges me, or I'm leaving."
Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/obama-white-house-problems-confidence-men-economic-team-geithner-2011-9?op=1#ixzz1Yb6oBN5f
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Larry Summers hijacked the administration's economic policy — and the White House let him
According to Suskind's account, Summers sweet-talked his way into the President's inner economic circle, but considered the NEC job beneath him. So he added conditions: He would be the gatekeeper for all economic matters that went to the Oval Office. Obama accepted, against the counsel of some of his closest advisors.
The system drove Obama's other economic advisors crazy — they found that when Summers disagreed with their view it somehow never made it to the president. In one account, after Orzag submitted a report directly to the president — at Obama's request — Summers stormed into Orzag's office yelling "What you've done is IMMORAL!"
By the end of 2009, Summers was trying to exercise control over even broader areas of domestic policy, demanding "content control" for all information on environmental/energy, tax policy, and healthcare.
But when Orzag complained to Emanuel, Rahm asked him to "help him out" and understand how difficult it was to manage Summers.
Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/obama-white-house-problems-confidence-men-economic-team-geithner-2011-9?op=1#ixzz1Yb7iFw88
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The White House Boys' Club: Obama Has a Woman Problem
Time ^ | 9/21/2011 | Amy Sullivan
Posted on September 22, 2011 2:47:10 AM EDT by comebacknewt
Nearly every professional woman has had the experience of saying something in a meeting, receiving no response, and then listening as a male colleague offers the same thought or suggestion minutes later to great acclaim. The first time it happens, she feels slightly foolish and is a little unsettled. Did I say that out loud or just in my head? Maybe he made the point better than I did. The second time it happens, she gets frustrated. The third time, she gets angry.
Look at the senior women meeting with Obama in this White House photo at a dinner they called to discuss their invisibility. Look at their faces and body language. They are pissed off.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
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33,
if you are going to be offended, on behalf of women, for obama's actions-
then you should also be offended, on behalf of your own actions, for posting so many pics of palin's legs.
As much as I dislike her, posting a pic of Palin's legs in a lawn chair on vacation is crass for me. You've done it many times. It's sexist - it really is. You haven't posted pix of Eric Cantor in his speedos.
So it's not fair to be so offended at obama.
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I'm not offended at all, I find it hilarious since the Obama Admn was supposed to be so woman friendly, liberal, etc.
What did these libtard women expect? Muslim men always treat women like dogs and dirt.
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I'm not offended at all,
So you're bitching about the Obama admin on their behalf, why again? LOL cause you whine about obama's breakfast choices. You whine about everything he does. Your team lost in 2008 cause Mccain was a douche who chose an idiot. Tea party jumped the shark. Obama isn't losing in every poll like he should be after 3 years of nonstop BS.
So now youre whining about causes you claim you dont even care about. Okay.
Obama Has a Woman Problem
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So you're bitching about the Obama admin on their behalf, why again? LOL cause you whine about obama's breakfast choices. You whine about everything he does. Your team lost in 2008 cause Mccain was a douche who chose an idiot. Tea party jumped the shark. Obama isn't losing in every poll like he should be after 3 years of nonstop BS.
So now youre whining about causes you claim you dont even care about. Okay.
romney is beating him in gallup.
Remember - Reagan was losing to Carter all the way till the end too bro.
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Sounds like Obama's Inexperience, indecion and lack of strength to stand up to Summers and Geithner help lead to the doubling down of stupid.
Not only is Obama a puppet but he is also a weak ass stooge.
But wait, he's the first black president, is that's why people like Andre and benny give him a free pass?
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Sounds like Obama's Inexperience, indecion and lack of strength to stand up to Summers and Geithner help lead to the doubling down of stupid.
Not only is Obama a puppet but he is also a weak ass stooge.
But wait, he's the first black president, is that's why people like Andre and benny give him a free pass?
I can't for the life of me understand why obama brought larry summers and geithner in the WH considering their role in Glass Steagal repeal, the NY Fed, etc etc.
Well, I can . . . . . actually . . . . . it just is something the obamabots dont want to hear.
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I can't for the life of me understand why obama brought larry summers and geithner in the WH considering their role in Glass Steagal repeal, the NY Fed, etc etc.
Well, I can . . . . . actually . . . . . it just is something the obamabots dont want to hear.
Summers is evidentially a real arrogant dick head. Many of the people the author interviewed talked as a way to justify their roles blaming Obama's inexperience for this mess. What a weak piece of shit that he can't even control the people he appointed.
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Summers is evidentially a real arrogant dick head. Many of the people the author interviewed talked as a way to justify their roles blaming Obama's inexperience for this mess. What a weak piece of shit that he can't even control the people he appointed.
Its a crime reading the exerpts of this book that make it seem more of a debating society than anything in there. I thought obama was supposed to have a fucking plan for Gods' sake!
And another thing - you bring in people like Geithner, Summers, etc - what the hell do you expect is going to happen?
I mean really?
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Its a crime reading the exerpts of this book that make it seem more of a debating society than anything in there. I thought obama was supposed to have a fucking plan for Gods' sake!
And another thing - you bring in people like Geithner, Summers, etc - what the hell do you expect is going to happen?
I mean really?
Hope and change really meant: same old bull shit.
I bet there are or were many legit intelligent Obama supporters that are mad as hell that they voted for him. The rest are just fucking idiots who probably think OJ is innocent also.
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I can't for the life of me understand why obama brought larry summers and geithner in the WH considering their role in Glass Steagal repeal, the NY Fed, etc etc.
Well, I can . . . . . actually . . . . . it just is something the obamabots dont want to hear.
He also bullied the then head of the CFTC, Brooksely Born (Female) when she tried to regulate and make transparent the derivatives market because no one really knew what was going on with such a huge market, no one. He threatened her, treated her like a child and then got a bunch of retarded Congressmen (who knew nothing about what they were talking about, just reading talking points from Summers/Greenspan...I'm looking at you Phil Gramm) to belittle her at the hearings. He then got her fired.
What happened after that? Long Term Capital Management collapsed. Doh!
This is a huge problem in D.C., I've mentioned it before, you have all of these recycled fuckhead court jesters that rotate presidents and such...hanging around like a fungus peddling their failed ideas and generally fucking things up. Larry Summers, David Gergen, Brent Scowcroft etc are all examples. They really haven't ever been right, but they're still around for some reason.
This is why you had the obsession with Iraq, Wall Street craziness, no new ideas during this current crisis etc.
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The movie "The Warning" PBS did should be required viewing for everyone.
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March 2009 Obama had his chance to stop the madness, but instead blinked and rolled over.
suskind on Ratigan today.
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York: Media bias on display as NBC grills Suskind
by
Byron York Chief Political Correspondent
Ron Suskind's 2004 book on the White House during George W. Bush's presidency, titled "The Price of Loyalty" sits on display in a bookstore. Suskind's recent appearance on the "Today" show about his new book on the Obama White House, "Confidence Men," contrasted sharply than when he went on to promote the earlier book.You want a quick and easy introduction to media bias? Just look at the reception given to author Ron Suskind when he appeared on NBC's "Today" show this week to promote his new book, "Confidence Men," which is critical of President Obama -- and then compare it to the reception Suskind received in 2004 when he appeared on "Today" to tout another book,"The Price of Loyalty," which was critical of President George W. Bush.
Start with the new book. The newsworthy bits in "Confidence Men" are well known: Suskind reports the Obama White House is tough on women, with former aide Anita Dunn calling it "a genuinely hostile workplace to women." Suskind also says Obama's top economic advisers had so little regard for the president that former National Economic Council chief Larry Summers said, "There's no adult in charge." And Suskind writes that on at least one occasion Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner ignored a clear directive from the president.
A lot of that is small-scale Washington chatter. The bigger picture from the book is one of a president not up to the job during perilous economic times. And that's not an image the White House wants to encourage with the 2012 re-election effort under way. So White House officials pushed back hard -- with a big assist from "Today."
Among the less substantive criticisms of the book, White House press secretary Jay Carney has suggested that Suskind lifted a small passage from Wikipedia. So with all the other issues that might be discussed, "Today" anchor Ann Curry began the interview with this: "Did you or did you not lift that passage from Wikipedia?"
Of course not, Suskind said. (Comparing the texts, no fair-minded reader would convict him of the charge.) Suskind tried to be dismissive, saying that "after a week, that's all [the White House] came up with."
"Well, they've actually come up with more," Curry responded. "So let me get to it."
Curry noted that Dunn has denied making the "hostile workplace" comment and demanded: "Did you take liberties with that quote?" No, Suskind said, adding that he actually played the audio of Dunn's (accurately quoted) words to a Washington Post reporter.
Curry then questioned the "no adult in charge" quote. "Did Summers believe the president was in over his head or didn't he?" Curry demanded. That's what he said, replied Suskind, noting that many people in the Obama White House cooperated with the book. "They say they cooperated with you because they were concerned about the direction you were taking," Curry shot back. "They wanted to make sure that you got it right."
On the Geithner story, Curry demanded: "Did Geithner ignore the president, or didn't he?" He did, Suskind said.
Curry still wasn't finished, forcing Suskind to defend the kind of trivial mistakes that appear in many books. Curry noted that "Confidence Men" refers to CNBC reporter Erin Burnett as "Erin Burkett," and that it also says the Dow Jones industrial average dropped 378 points on Feb. 10, 2009, when it in fact dropped 382 points. "So do you agree," Curry said to Suskind, "that if you cannot get these details right, then the broader analysis ... that you put forth in this book ... has got to be questioned?"
The White House couldn't have written the script better itself.
Now compare that to Suskind's appearance on "Today" back on Jan. 12, 2004, to promote his book "The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House and the Education of Paul O'Neill." Written with O'Neill, the former Treasury secretary turned Bush critic, the book was at least as strong an indictment of the Bush White House as "Confidence Men" is of the Obama White House.
But what a different reception Suskind received on "Today." Then-anchor Katie Couric's first substantive question was, "What, in your view, are the bombshells here?" Another Couric question: "There was apparently ... no debate in the White House ... It was all based on ideology or sort of political expediency?" And then, noting that the Bush White House disputed the book, Couric asked, "[O'Neill] had an unbelievable amount of documentation to back up some of his claims ... correct?" Suskind knocked each softball out of the park.
Why the difference? Was Ron Suskind a great reporter in 2004 and a terrible one in 2011? Or is it OK with "Today" to criticize Bush but not OK to criticize Obama? It sure looks like the latter.
Byron York, The Examiner's chief political correspondent, can be contacted at byork@washingtonexaminer.com. His column appears on Tuesday and Friday, and his stories and blogposts appear on ExaminerPolitics.com.
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I am making my way through this book. highly recommended.
page 149. Obama and Romer were love at first sight - LMFAO!!!!!!
I guess Bama loves obese hippos.
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Book or not, most people already know Downgrade to be a loser. The MSM can try to spin that any way they want but it's not working.
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Book or not, most people already know Downgrade to be a loser. The MSM can try to spin that any way they want but it's not working.
this book is really good. it's no wonder team kneepad is attacking it. Chock full of details showing what a buffoon we have as potus.
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Book or not, most people already know Downgrade to be a loser. The MSM can try to spin that any way they want but it's not working.
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LMFAO - obama is in a meeting with all his economic a advisors discussing stim bill, economy, etc and Obama , who sat silently for most blurts out " what about smart grids?".
Fail.
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Stop kneepadding and get this book.
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Page 157 - pelosi staff already started laughing at the stupidity of Obama.
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Page 164 - Byron Dorgan, demo senator went to Obama and directly said to him "you picked the wrong economic team" before Obama even took office.
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This book is must reading. The fact that Obama brought in summers, geithner, gentsler, bernake, lew, et al speaks volumes.
The treatment of Brooks.ey borne is equally disgusting.
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Stop kneepadding and get this book.
He's incapable of doing it. At this point I'm convinced that 180's actually a bundler for Downgrade's reelection campaign.
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This book is actually very good. Forget the nonsense about the women issue etc. the wall street, economy stuff is VERY informative.
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Page 183. - obama just let Larry summers run the Econ agenda.
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This book is must reading. The fact that Obama brought in summers, geithner, gentsler, bernake, lew, et al speaks volumes.
The treatment of Brooks.ey borne is equally disgusting.
Yep Obama works for Wall Street
Can you name one republican besides who doesnt?
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Yep Obama works for Wall Street
Can you name one republican besides who doesnt?
Not the point of the book. I am 200 pages in and this book is really good. Obama was simply not prepared for pouts, nor was moccasin tbph. Maybe romney, but few others.
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Really want to throw up reading this book how Blair and borne were ignored.
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Yep Obama works for Wall Street
Can you name one republican besides who doesnt?
How many gimmicks do you have, you fucking loser?
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How many gimmicks do you have, you fucking loser?
Obama picking summers to be in the WH , and then pursuing health care, seems like what cinched this iditio for a failed presidency.
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How many gimmicks do you have, you fucking loser?
Just this account:)
The lib are dumb to vote Obama and you are dumb to vote who-ever unless you vote RP that is
Othervise not much difference
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Just this account:)
The lib are dumb to vote Obama and you are dumb to vote who-ever unless you vote RP that is
Othervise not much difference
Obama set his kenyan eyes on health c3e regardless of anything else. For that alone, in light of the economic disaster, he needs to go. This book is proof enough of what a freak show we have as poptus.
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The White House has a SERIOUS women problem
According to the book, top female staffers were marginalized by the boy's club mentality of the Obama White House. "Looking back, this place would be in court for a hostile workplace," former communications director Anita Dunn told Suskind. "Because it actually fit all of the classic legal requirements for a genuinely hostile workplace to women."
As the only woman on the economic team, Romer disproportionately bore the brunt of this hostility. Staffers said Summers' often tried to humiliate Romer in morning briefings — it got so bad that Obama senior advisor Valerie Jarrett had to call meetings for female staffers to air their grievances.
The President was not only complacent, but also responsible for the problem, Suskind notes. During one meeting with a group of economists, Romer wrote a note to Summers: "Either he acknowledges me, or I'm leaving."
Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/obama-white-house-problems-confidence-men-economic-team-geithner-2011-9?op=1#ixzz1Yb6oBN5f
BUMP FOR 240 AND BLACKASS
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Suskind's Confidence Men Raises Questions About Obama's Credibility
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dan-froomkin/suskinds-confidence-men-r_b_1123660.html
Obama is heading back onto the campaign trail, running as a champion of the middle class and even hoping to harness the Occupy movement's public anger at Wall Street.
But the higher he soars with his populist rhetoric, the more he calls attention to the enormous gap between the promise of hope and change that he campaigned on in 2008 and the actions he has taken as president -- especially regarding the economy, which is still stagnating, and Wall Street, which remains unpunished and unbowed even after causing the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression.
As a result, voters will inevitably be asking themselves: Who is this guy, really? Does he mean what he says? Will he do what he says? And would a second-term Obama be different?
One answer to why Obama underperformed is laid out in searing detail in Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Ron Suskind's latest book, Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington, and the Education of a President.
In the book, Suskind describes how Obama made the conscious choice to staff his economic team with former Clinton appointees whose sympathies were with Wall Street -- and that those men were unable to see how drastically out of whack the country's financial system had gotten both because they helped create it and because it had served them so well.
Then, rather than forcefully impose his campaign's populist vision on these men, Obama again consciously chose to defer to them repeatedly -- and tolerated it even when they slow-walked, pushed back against, or simply ignored his instructions.
The White House launched an aggressive counterattack when the book came out in September, initially centered around nitpicking over a few minor factual errors.
In perhaps the broadest on-the-record denial from the White House, National Economic Council Director Gene Sperling told CNN: "The notion that this president was not leading and making the tough choices all along is just dead wrong, and I say that as somebody who's been here every moment... This president has been focused and tough and decisive in leading us in this economic team and I think that is the story, and anything else really does a disservice to this administration and the real record that has been established."
The White House pushback was followed by brickbats from some mainstream journalists -- particularly Slate's Jacob Weisberg.
But the attacks on the book only glanced off Suskind's central theme -- which is more subtle than his critics have made it out to be -- because that theme was derived directly from on-the-record interviews with key players, internal documents that Suskind brought to light, and the outcomes we've all seen with our own eyes.
And though the book focuses on the first two years of Obama's presidency, and a group of "confidence men" that is mostly gone now, the leadership style Suskind describes, and the strikingly similar makeup of Obama's new economic team, suggest that Obama is still incapable of -- or, alas, uninterested in -- acting on his own words.
"You do have to start asking yourself a pretty tough set of questions about what his fundamental views actually are on so many of these issues," says Suskind. "Did he ever believe that he was going to be doing many of those things that he inspired people with in the campaign?"
Mind The Gap
During his 2008 presidential campaign, Obama spoke eloquently and strikingly about the excesses of Wall Street.
In his September 2007 speech at the NASDAQ, Obama invoked FDR. "Amid a crisis of confidence Roosevelt called for a 're-appraisal of values,' " Obama said. FDR made clear "that in order for us to prosper as one nation, '...the responsible heads of finance and industry, instead of acting each for himself, must work together to achieve the common end.'"
This, he concluded, was "another moment that requires, in FDR's words, a re-appraisal of our values as a nation."
In the midst of the U.S. government's September 2008 bank bailout, Obama told a Nevada audience: "Let me be perfectly clear. The fact that we are in this mess is an outrage. It's an outrage because we did not get here by accident. This was not a normal part of the business cycle. This was not the actions of a few bad apples.
"This financial crisis is a direct result of the greed and irresponsibility that has dominated Washington and Wall Street for years."
And although he said it wasn't time yet, he promised: "There will be time to punish those who set this fire."
In October 2008, he promise to "take on the corruption in Washington and on Wall Street to make sure a crisis like this can never, ever happen again."
And one day before he was elected president, he told a Florida audience: "Tomorrow, you can turn the page on policies that have put the greed and irresponsibility of Wall Street before the hard work and sacrifice of folks on Main Street."
Obama's most seminal speech on the crisis was his March 2008 address at Cooper Union. There, he laid part of the blame for the disaster on Clinton-era financial deregulation, including the 1999 repeal of the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act. That repeal, which broke down barriers between commercial and investment banking, led to the growth of financial behemoths that were able to take enormous risks with impunity because they were "too big to fail."
"nstead of establishing a 21st century regulatory framework, we simply dismantled the old one, aided by a legal but corrupt bargain in which campaign money all too often shaped policy and watered down oversight," Obama said. "In doing so we encouraged a winner take all, anything goes environment that helped foster devastating dislocations in our economy."
Among the foremost champions of that deregulatory regime were the key members of President Clinton's economic team, including Robert Rubin, who was Clinton's treasury secretary, Larry Summers, who succeeded Rubin, and Timothy Geithner, who worked directly under both of them.
But once Obama was elected, and was staring into the maw of staggeringly large financial crisis, he made a fateful decision: He left most of his progressive economic advisers behind -- including such liberal luminaries as Robert Reich and Joseph Stiglitz -- and chose to go with name brand Clinton officials instead. Summers became his chief economic adviser, Geithner became his Treasury secretary, and fellow Rubin protégé Peter Orszag became his budget director. (According to Suskind, Obama even offered Rubin himself an office in the White House.)
The "bold visions of the campaign season... resolved into the serious, often risk-averse business of actually governing," Suskind writes. "In the midst of a battering economic storm, it no longer seemed like the right time to be making waves."
While the appointments of these men and a slew of similarly pedigreed subordinates reassured the financial markets, their leadership undermined Obama's populist promises.
Many of them had already spent their interregnum feeding at the Wall Street trough.
Summers was paid $5.2 million for his part-time work for a massive hedge fund in 2008 alone, according to financial disclosure forms that were released on a Friday night several months after his appointment. That same year, he also raked in more than $2.7 million in fees for speaking engagements at such places as Citigroup, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch and Goldman Sachs. For one speech alone, Goldman Sachs paid him a cool $135,000.
Rubin, whose influence remained enormous among the new Obama appointees, left Treasury to join Citigroup, a mega-bank that took on ever-riskier, life-threatening stances during his tenure while he managed to snare $126 million in cash and stock.
(How could all this money not be corrupting? Why did Obama trust these guys? Those were questions I was asking from my perch at the Washington Post at the time, and they were never answered.)
Although Geithner didn't work directly for the banks, he regulated such firms as Citigroup and, as head of the New York Fed, helped engineer bailouts in the fall of 2008 that put billions of extra tax dollars in the coffers of major Wall Street firms, most notably Goldman Sachs.
Rather than give this team clear marching orders, Obama asked them what he should do, according to Suskind's account. Not surprisingly, they were loath to suggest anything that would harm Wall Street, or, as they put it, spook the market.
Instead of "tough love", the Obama White House showered the banks in cash and federal guarantees to make sure they could "earn their way back to health". There was no "haircut", no restructuring of the banks or the system that had done so much harm. Even the bankers were surprised, according to Suskind.
Former Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker -- a relative progressive when compared to the advisers Obama chose to heed -- told Suskind what his advice to Obama had been: "Well, right now, when you have your chance, and their breasts are bared, you need to put a spear through the heart of all these guys on Wall Street that for years have been mostly debt merchants."
By late March 2009, public sentiment against the banks, which had been growing since the bailouts of the previous fall, had reached a fever pitch. But when the CEOs of the 13 largest banking institutions in the United States came to the White House, Obama's own tone was conciliatory.
"I want to help," he told them. "I'm not out there to go after you. I'm protecting you. But if I'm going to shield you from public and congressional anger, you have to give me something to work with on these issues of compensation."
The bankers offered a few empty promises about voluntary compensation limits and went on to book two of the most profitable years in Wall Street's history
There were things Obama and his staff could have pushed for much more aggressively. That list included breaking up the big banks or forcing banks to come to terms with the toxic assets still lurking in their portfolios. The White House team could have listened to the people who saw the crisis coming or had a history of taking on Wall Street. They could have replaced Ben Bernanke at the Federal Reserve, rather than renominating him.
Instead, as Suskind describes, bold action was consistently thwarted by one means or another.
Obama's management style made that easy. "He feels like he needs consensus to have the confidence of action," Suskind told HuffPost.
Without the guiding star of Obama's campaign promises, his economic team settled on what they called a "Hippocratic" motto: First, do no harm. Suskind writes that Volcker saw that as a formula for small, modest actions:
The "do no harm" school, he said, "always sounds reasonable" in that it calls for delay, until matters worsen to the point, "where they'll be consensus that we need to act in a forceful way. But you never get that consensus, because many of the actors, the institutions and so forth, will follow their self-interest right off the cliff." Every policy of consequence, meanwhile, is going to "do some harm, something government, mind you, can and should cushion." But there's no other way "to create the larger good, something you look back on with pride."
For a young, new president "with a powerful intellect but little experience, this stance was always available as a sensible course," Suskind writes. Over time, it "increasingly felt like a prudential path, rather than a backing away from history's call to arms."
Sometimes, despite all this, Obama seemed to be opting for more decisive action. That, Suskind writes, is when the staff became insubordinate, "relitigating" matters that had been settled, "slow-walking" decisions that had been made -- and in at least one case, outright ignoring what they were told.
The most graphic of many illustrations of this is Suskind's recounting of a March 15, 2009, meeting at which Obama expressed a desire to draw up plans to break up the banks, which he said would "strike a blow for prudence" and would "begin to change the reckless behavior of Wall Street and show that accountability flows in both directions."
Instead, his team (led in this case by chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, who from 1999 to 2002 made more than $18 million working for a financial services firm) wore down his request to a simpler directive: Draw up a plan for restructuring Citibank.
"Well, okay, so we do Citibank and we do it thoroughly and well," Obama said, according to the book. "That would show everybody that they can trust those guys in government to do a hard job, and do it right. And then we go back to Congress and get the money to do the wider job that really needs to be done."
Yet even that wouldn't happen. Geithner simply never went ahead with it, according to the book, opting instead for his preferred strategy of applying "stress tests" to the banks -- to find out how much capital they needed from the government and other sources to stay afloat.
That, in essence, is what Japan did for its two decades of stagnation, and we're now three years along on that same path.
Liberals like Paul Krugman were aghast as the details began to leak. "It's as if the president were determined to confirm the growing perception that he and his economic team are out of touch, that their economic vision is clouded by excessively close ties to Wall Street," Krugman wrote in late March. "And by the time Mr. Obama realizes that he needs to change course, his political capital may be gone."
The Citibank incident and others like it, Suskind writes, reflected a "pernicious and personal dilemma emerging from inside the administration: that the young president's authority was being systematically undermined or hedged by his seasoned advisers."
"The president had lost control of his White House; he had almost no process to translate his will into policy on the occasions when he could decide on a coherent path," Suskind writes. "But such decisions were rare."
Back in March 2010, I wrote for HuffPost that "people looking for the reasons why the Obama presidency has not lived up to its promise won't find the answer amid the minor rifts between key players..... The fact is that after a campaign that appealed so successfully to idealism, Obama hired a bunch of saboteurs of hope and change."
I was thinking of Emanuel in particular. But when it comes to the economy, Suskind describes Summers as the guy who really tied Obama up in knots.
Here's Suskind quoting Orszag -- on the record, by name: "Larry just didn't think the president knew what he was deciding," Orszag said. "The question is why didn't [Obama] stop it," he told Suskind. "People realized the process wasn't working, and they kept saying it.... but the president didn't say, Goddammit!... He didn't demand that it be changed . . . and that can't be healthy."
A few days after the book came out, Geithner publicly denied slow-walking any orders from Obama.
"I would never do that," he said. "I have spent my life in public service. It's my great privilege to serve this President, and I would never contemplate doing that. But, again, I lived the original, and the reality I lived, we all lived together, bears no relation to the sad little stories I heard reported from that book."
Summers, who has never said publicly whether he actually read the book, issued a statement saying that the "the hearsay attributed to me is a combination of fiction, distortion and words taken out of context."
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Suskind's Confidence Men Raises Questions About Obama's Credibility
Posted: 12/ 1/11 02:19 PM ET React Important
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dan-froomkin/suskinds-confidence-men-r_b_1123660.html