Ironically, the job ended up requiring a steadfast advocate who was willing to make (or even seek out) enemies in order to harness the populist anger and resentment that drives public policy in America.
Like or no, it's not in Obama's constitution (or history) to knock heads, or decry and demonize- much less hold to account and prosecute appalling institutions or their abusive behavior in order to rally public sentiment- even in the worst of times.
Instead, he's a conciliator- a consensus builder who no one's afraid to cross (as there quite flagrantly haven't been consequences for doing so). Instead, to get a half measure (or even poor policy and steps backward that can be declared "victories) he's willing to appease the worst elements of the party and the nation.
A recent article in Alternet describes how in this respect, he's similar to Gaithner (and implies that maybe that's why Gaithner has his position).
Here's an excerpt:
Anyway getting back to Obama-Geithner -- in the early 1990s, a decade after Geithner protected D'Souza from a mob of angry students, Barack Obama found himself in a similar situation at Harvard law school. Obama had been named the first black editor of the Harvard Law Review, meaning he had to take a stand on one of the biggest issues dividing the law school's students: affirmative action.
Keep in mind that, without affirmative action, it's unlikely that Barack Obama would have been where he was, at Harvard Law, the first African-American editor of the esteemed school's legal magazine. Not because Obama wasn't qualified, but because affirmative action made it harder for the entrenched white elite to keep all the slots to themselves.
So how did Obama handle the battle between rightwing anti-affirmative action students and liberals? Just like Geithner would have. According to a profile a couple of years ago in the Boston Globe:
Classmates recall an especially emotional debate in the spring of 1990 over affirmative action, which conservative students wanted to abolish.
Presiding over an assembly of 60 mostly white editors in a law school classroom, Obama listened to impassioned pleas and pressed conservatives to explain their reasoning and liberals to sharpen their thinking. But he never spoke about his own point of view or mentioned that he believed he had benefited from affirmative action. "If anybody had walked by, they would have assumed he was a professor," said Thomas J. Perrelli, a classmate and former counsel to Attorney General Janet Reno. "He was leading the discussion but he wasn't trying to impose his own perspective on it. He was much more mediating."
Obama was so evenhanded and solicitous in his interactions that fellow students would do impressions of his Socratic chin-stroking approach to everything, even seeking a consensus on popcorn preferences at the movies. "Do you want salt on your popcorn?" one classmate, Nancy L. McCullough, recalled, mimicking his sensitive bass voice. "Do you even want popcorn?"
So you can start to see why Obama's press spokesman, Robert Gibbs, told reporters that the President has "full confidence" in Geithner. They're peas in a pod. In more ways than just their temperament.
To most of us, this sort of one-note obsession with conciliation and even-temperedness seems ill-suited to the times and circumstances. This country doesn't need the status quo maintained, it needs a complete change of the way this country is run, and the type of people running it.
But if you were one of the plutocrats, you'd have a different view of things. You'd want to preserve what you'd plundered, and hire some human buffers to get between you and the 300 million Americans you'd ripped off. And as the record shows, you couldn't choose two more perfect, reliable buffers than Tim Geithner and Barack Obama. Geithner, we know, was hired and promoted at the NY Fed and then at Treasury to do precisely that -- make sure that the heist went off smoothly and to keep the mobs away from the plutocrats....More:
http://www.alternet.org/politics/145181/do_obama_and_geithner_have_the_same_flaw%3A_accommodation_instead_of_moral_action?page=entire
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