Inside Man is Josh Green's look at Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner in the April issue of The Atlantic. As always, it's a good idea to read an entire article before judging it, especially since Green's piece is 11,000 words and the excerpt below is only 400.
The fact that most of the bailouts driving this anger occurred under George W. Bush has been easy to overlook, in part because Geithner is the most visible constant between the two administrations. At every stage, he has been central to the crisis—during the initial response, the design of the recovery plan, and the effort to devise new rules. "During the Bush administration," Keith Hennessey, a former director of Bush’s National Economic Council, told me, "you basically had three people who were the core in making the policy recommendations to the president and implementing them. And they were Hank Paulson, Ben Bernanke, and Tim Geithner. Now it’s Larry, Ben, and Tim, and Tim has moved chairs. What this means is that two-thirds of the core policy group is unchanged from Bush to Obama. The Obama political and communications operations have always wanted to emphasize just how different and transformative the Obama solutions are, relative to the Bush people who—they claim—left them this enormous problem. The reality is, there is remarkable continuity, from a personnel standpoint and a policy standpoint, in what’s being done."
That reality has become a liability. Geithner designed Obama’s response to the crisis—a response that, along with the stimulus and the Federal Reserve’s actions, has been cheaper and more effective than many people predicted, though still imperfect. But this success has been obscured, partly by stubborn high unemployment but mostly by the perception that Obama has "put the interests of Wall Street above those of Main Street." And more than anyone else, Geithner is held to blame.
But to think of Geithner only in the context of Wall Street, rather than Washington and national politics, is to miss a lot of what’s going on. Geithner’s career coincides almost exactly with an important shift in how the Democratic Party thinks about finance, a shift that set off the wave of deregulation and reoriented the institutions he served. Any study of Geithner is unavoidably a study of how both political parties came to agree that the interests of the financial sector must predominate, of what went wrong when those interests did predominate, and of how someone whose glittering career is a product of that system wound up at the center of an effort to write new rules for it. At the center, really, of the whole Obama presidency.
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At Daily Kos on this date in 2003 - Bush's declaration of war:
I listened to Bush's speech on the radio. It was easily the best of his presidency. Rhetorically it was tight, the delivery strong, and the arguments persuassive.
Too bad it was based on long-discredited lies. It's easy to build the case for war when truth is no object -- especially since any attempt to expose such lies will be labeled as "unpatriotic".
