Just as I had suspected, Ron Suskind's book on the Confidence Men who were involved in our nation's financial collapse, praises Barack Obama's successful 2008 campaign all the way to the end of the campaign, but the tone of the book changes immediately after election day, when the consequences of Barack Obama's lack of managerial experience began to bear fruit.
Obama's choice of Timothy Geithner as Treasury Secretary was the first example of those consequences. One of Geithner's responsibilities as Treasury Secretary would be to oversee the I.R.S. He had failed to pay over $34,000 in taxes, and improperly deducted his children's summer camp costs, admitted it to Obama's vetting committee, and was still nominated by Obama!
Obama's next mistake was to appoint Mr. know-it-all Larry Summers to head Obama's National Council of Economic Advisers. Ousted as President of Harvard because of sexist remarks about women and incompetent handling of Harvard's investment portfolio, Summers was, nevertheless, Obama's choice to coordinate economic advisers, despite the fact that the most important issue facing the new administration was the collapsing economy.
Thinking Geithner and Summers would get the economy moving again, Obama took his eyes off that challenge to push health care as his plan for a presidential legacy, despite the fact that the economy was in a severe recession, in no shape to bear the start-up costs of such a radical overhaul of a major part of our economy.
No comments:
Post a Comment