Here's The One That Got Me... So Far...

[WillyT]

Frank Rich: I guess I thought Geithner's role was more shocking just because I have become inured to tales of Summers's outrageousness, dating back to his ill-fated presidency of Harvard. Particularly damning in Suskind's narrative is that when Summers says "there's no adult in charge" in the White House, he's actually right — and appoints himself as adult in charge, Alexander Haig–style. Summers was in charge, all right, but he behaved like a child and little got done except derailing the president's initiatives — he even blocked Obama's agenda of tough climate-change legislation.

But the buck stops with Obama. There's a poignant moment of sorts in December 2008 when the North Dakota senator Byron Dorgan implores the president-elect not to go with his economic team. "I don't understand how you could do this," he tells him. "You've picked the wrong people!" As indeed Obama did, under the tutelage of Robert Rubin, who also tried to finagle a White House guru role for himself, not unlike the perch from which he helped wreak havoc at Citigroup during its subprime orgy. So Suskind's book often reads like Halberstam's "Best and the Brightest," with Summers and Geithner as McNamara and Bundy. But the quagmire isn't a neo-Vietnam like Afghanistan — it's the economy, and the casualties are measured in lost jobs. After the stimulus bill passed in February 2009, Suskind writes, "little else happened on the jobs front for a year and a half," with proposals being "talked to death without resolution."

Adam Moss: I kept flipping back and forth between fury at Obama and — I know I'm easy — sympathy. So much of the damage comes from the initial decision to hire these guys, a decision he had to make almost immediately after being elected. He was inexperienced, he needed help, they burned him, he let them — that's the story in brief. The number of stupefyingly momentous decisions he had to make in those first few months put me in a vicarious panic. There was no obvious path, the way I read it — though in your view, I suspect, the choices were clearer. Though we'll never know for sure what other solutions might have worked, the book is a litany of missed opportunities, particularly with respect to financial reform (one banker after another wonders incredulously — and anonymously — why Obama didn't pin them when they were down). Would some other president have had more success?

One thing you're struck with is how bizarre it is that Obama has this job in the first place. Obama feels that too — and it gives him a deluded sense of his own magical powers. "Look, I feel lucky," he says. "Just look at me. My name is Barack Hussein Obama and I'm sitting here." He's cocky, but also kind of amazed. What an astonishing blend of good and bad luck the man has had — the unusual cocktail of circumstances that brought him to the White House, and the pretty much impossible situation he faced when he got there. Which is not to say it's not agonizing to watch him, in the book, fail time after time to make the big, bold move — the book is a narrative after all, and passivity (or, to be fair, caution), does not become a protagonist.

Link: http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2011/09/obamas_economic_quagmire_frank.html

Curiously...it makes me want to support Obama... we'll see...

:shrug:

[la la]

1. me, too- me, too n/t

[lumberjack_jeff]

2. I think we all *want* to support Obama. n/t