The White House seemed utterly blindsided by the public’s revulsion at the moneyed insiders’ culture illuminated by Daschle’s post-Senate career. Yet last week’s events suggest that the administration learned nothing from that brush with disaster.
Is this Obama's Katrina?
It's not really about money, at least not just money. The people I've talked to -- well, listened to -- are expressing a range of opinions. Those who just knew Obama was never going to be as good as McCain and hope he screws up? They're wearing smug little smiles. The rest of us are still convinced that if anyone can get us out of the Bush mess, Obama can do it. But we're also feeling a little shaky.
Nothing wrong with Obama, mind you, it's the people who work for him. Frank Rich looks at the people carrying the president's economic messages and thinks both Summers and Geithner have a lot to answer for.
Summers is so tone-deaf that he makes Geithner seem like Bobby Kennedy. Bob Schieffer of CBS asked Summers the simple question that has haunted the American public since the
bailouts began last fall: “Do you know, Dr. Summers, what the banks
have done with all of this money that has been funneled to them through
these bailouts?” What followed was a monologue of evasion that,
translated into English, amounted to: Not really, but you little folk needn’t worry about it.
So why in hell is someone as savvy and decent -- so committed to transparency -- as Barack Obama letting this happen? How could he not have caught on to the public's dismay and even fury?
... Why has there been so little transparency and so much evasiveness so far? The answer, I fear, is that too many of the administration’s officials are too marinated in the insiders’ culture to police it, reform it or own up to their own past complicity with it. The “dirty little secret,” Obama told Leno on Thursday, is that “most of the stuff that got us into trouble was perfectly legal.” An even dirtier secret is that a prime mover in keeping that stuff legal was Summers, who helped torpedo the regulation of derivatives while in the Clinton administration. His mentor Robert Rubin, no less, wrote in his 2003 memoir that Summers underestimated how the risk of derivatives might multiply “under extraordinary circumstances.”
Quite apart from the potential for economic disaster, Obama risks leading the country into political disaster.
To fall short would be to
deliver us into the catastrophic hands of a Republican opposition whose
only known economic program is to reject job-creating stimulus spending
and root for Obama and, by extension, the country to fail.
It's not as though there aren't any bipartisan, no-fail recovery programs out there.
