(2011-09-30) Suskind Obama Confidence Men

Ron Suskind's latest book, Confidence Men, is about the Barack Obama administration, hampered by a White House economic staff plagued by internal rivalries, a domineering chief adviser and a Treasury secretary who dragged his feet on enforcing decisions with which he disagreed... Mr. Obama’s decisions were routinely “re-litigated” by the chairman of the National Economic Council, Larry Summers. Some decisions, including one to overhaul the debt-ridden CitiBank, were carried out sluggishly or not at all by a resistant Treasury secretary, Tim Geithner, according to the book.

He was accused of various inaccuracies but has backed at least some of them up. In its broad strokes, the portrait of the Obama White House that Suskind paints matches up with those of the administration’s previous three high-profile chroniclers - Jonathan Alter, Richard Wolffe and Bob Woodward.

“Confidence Men” offers support for some of today’s standard progressive gripes about the President, and for a few of the conservative ones. Obama was green, and not just environmentally. He had no managerial experience, while his only Washington experience was two active years in the Senate—and it showed, at least inside the West Wing. He made Rahm Emanuel his chief of staff instead of Tom Daschle, who, besides engineering quicker passage for a better health-care bill, might have tamed the policymaking chaos of raging staff egos and Presidential reticence. For the highest economic posts Obama picked Geithner and Summers, who were implicated in the deregulatory status quo and wary of fundamental reform—Team B, Suskind calls them—while passing over Team A, the heterodox skeptics, such as Paul Volcker and Austan Goolsbee, who had guided him through the campaign, when his prescience about the coming crisis and his sureness when it struck had sealed his November victory. Team B underestimated the severity of the economic debacle. For that reason—and also to woo conservative congressional Democrats and, futilely, Republicans—Obama’s stimulus proposal was too small and too larded with relatively ineffectual tax cuts.