The New York Times / September 18, 2011 Book review: Glimpses of Obama Among ‘Friends’ By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
CONFIDENCE MEN: Wall Street, Washington, and the Education of a President By Ron Suskind, Illustrated. 515 pages. Harper. $29.99. The portrait of the Obama White House that the veteran journalist Ron Suskind draws in his searing new book, “Confidence Men,” is that of a young, inexperienced president lacking the leadership and managerial skills to deal effectively with the cascading economic problems he inherited; a brainy but detached executive with a tendency to frame policy matters intellectually “like a journalist, or narrator, or skilled observer”; an oddly passive C.E.O. whose directive on restructuring the banks in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis was, the author says, ignored or slow-walked by his own economic team. “Confidence Men,” Mr. Suskind says, was based on interviews with more than 200 people, including former and current members of the Obama administration, as well as the president himself. Because the book essentially begins with Mr. Obama’s crash course in economics as a candidate and ends in early 2011, Mr. Suskind does not place the mismanagement and indecisiveness he describes in these pages in perspective with the tough-minded decision by Mr. Obama to sign off on the high-risk mission that led to the killing of Osama bin Laden in May. Given the country’s continuing economic woes, high unemployment and worries among Democrats about Mr. Obama’s re-election prospects, the book makes for timely reading, though its truncated scope means that it does not deal with the debt ceiling fight or Mr. Obama’s more recent efforts to address the jobs crisis. The most withering assessments of Mr. Obama in this volume come from bickering former members of his economic team, a team that Richard Wolffe, the author of two books about Mr. Obama, has described as “the most dysfunctional group of the president’s advisers.” Mr. Suskind quotes a former chairman of the National Economic Council under Mr. Obama, Lawrence H. Summers — who is himself characterized by colleagues in these pages as a bullying know-it-all who acted as a kind of gatekeeper to the Oval Office on things economic — as saying to the budget director, Peter Orszag: “We’re home alone. There’s no adult in charge. Clinton would never have made these mistakes.” Mr. Summers told The Washington Post in an e-mail on Friday that “the hearsay attributed to me” in the Suskind book “is a combination of fiction, distortion, and words taken out of context.” Also quoted in “Confidence Men” is Paul A. Volcker, the former Federal Reserve chairman who headed the President’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board, who describes the president as both “too self-confident” and too reliant on Mr. Summers: “Obama is smart, but smart is not enough. Leadership is another thing entirely, about knowing your mind enough to make real decisions, ones that last.” As for how women fared within the White House, Christina D. Romer, the former chairwoman of the Council of Economic Advisers, is quoted saying she “felt like a piece of meat” after being boxed out of a meeting by Mr. Summers. And the former communications director Anita Dunn is quoted saying the Obama White House “fit all of the classic legal requirements for a genuinely hostile workplace to women.” Questioned by reporters last week about these remarks, both women have said they were misquoted or that their comments had been misconstrued. Given these denials, how is the reader to evaluate the accuracy of the accounts here? Why have so many people in the Obama administration vented to Mr. Suskind in the first place, when the president was only partway through his first term? Like many of Bob Woodward’s sources a lot of them are motivated by spin, score settling and second-guessing. Given the stalled economy and the president’s sliding poll numbers, some former staff members are playing the blame game early, while others seem to be hoping to goad the president into a reboot and a more aggressive stance before the 2012 election. Mr. Suskind — a Pulitzer Prize winner and former reporter at The Wall Street Journal — has a flair for taking material he’s harvested to create narratives with a novelistic sense of drama. With Mr. Obama, who is depicted here as having lost the thread of his own story line, Mr. Suskind supplies a story line of his own: that of “a brilliant amateur” whose early tenure in office was marked by drift, hesitancy and an inability “to translate his will into policy on the occasions when he could decide on a coherent path.” Mr. Obama emerges in this volume as an oddly passive chief executive whose modus operandi was to sketch out overarching principles, “wait until others had painted in those outlines with hard proposals” and then “step down from his above-the-fray perch to close the deal.” In “Confidence Men” Mr. Suskind suggests that this approach ceded oversight of the hard details of policy to others (Congress in the case of health care; the Treasury secretary, Timothy F. Geithner, and his deputies in the case of fiscal reform), leading to a loss of control and momentum. Mr. Suskind also questions the president’s “growing inclination to seek consensus” in contentious policy debates among his advisers (much like his inclination to seek consensus with hostile Republicans in Congress). “The administration’s domestic policy was fast becoming a debate society run by Larry Summers,” Ms. Suskind writes. “Obama would sit on high, trying to judge if there was any shared ground between the competing debate teams that might coalesce into a policy.” Mr. Suskind asks whether this was “a model for sound decision making, a crutch to delay, or avoid, the decisions only a president can make, or a recipe for producing half-measures — a pinch of this matched with a scoop of that — masquerading as solutions.” Some of the points Mr. Suskind makes in this book about internal White House dynamics will be familiar to readers of Jonathan Alter’s 2010 book, “The Promise: President Obama, Year One.” Many of his negative assessments of the administration’s handling of the economy and fiscal reform also echo arguments set forth by the economist Joseph E. Stiglitz in “Freefall: America, Free Markets, and the Sinking of the World Economy,” and by the journalist Michael Hirsh in “Capital Offense: How Washington’s Wise Men Turned America’s Future Over to Wall Street.” Like these authors Mr. Suskind suggests that the administration’s problems in dealing with the fiscal crisis began with the president’s choice of his economic team. He wonders why Mr. Obama turned away from the advisers who had seen him through the campaign (including more progressive thinkers like Mr. Stiglitz, Robert Reich and Austan Goolsbee), and relied instead on two men associated with the deregulatory policies of the past, Mr. Geithner, the Treasury secretary, and Mr. Summers, the chief economic adviser. Both men had served in the Clinton administration (with Treasury Secretary Robert E. Rubin, who would later join Citigroup as a senior adviser and board member); their actions, Mr. Suskind contends, “had contributed to the very financial disaster they were hired to solve.” As Mr. Suskind tells it, Mr. Obama’s bold promises as a candidate to implement a broad swath of new regulations to monitor Wall Street gave way to Mr. Geithner’s philosophy, described here as “first, do no harm,” a philosophy, Mr. Volcker says, that “always sounds reasonable” in that it calls for delay until matters worsen to the point “where there’ll be consensus that we need to act in a forceful way.” But, Mr. Volcker says, “you never get that consensus, because so many of the actors, the institutions and so forth, will follow their own self-interest right off a cliff.” In what will be one of the more talked-about passages in this book — already disputed in the news — Mr. Suskind contends that Mr. Obama did decide in early 2009 that a plan should be pulled together “to restructure many of the large, troubled banks starting with Citigroup,” but that he discovered nearly a month later that this directive “had been ignored by the Treasury.” Mr. Suskind characterizes this incident as indicative of the president’s authority “being systematically undermined or hedged by his seasoned advisers,” “a matter perilously close to insubordination.” He writes that when he asked Mr. Obama about the bank incident, the president replied that while the bureaucracy’s speed in executing his decisions was “slower than I wanted,” it’s “not clear to me that that was necessarily because of a management problem, as it was that this is really hard stuff.” Mr. Geithner — whom one top banker quoted in these pages refers to as “our man in Washington” for helping avert more systemic changes affecting Wall Street — denies that he obstructed or slow-walked any presidential directive; the White House pressed him to stay on as Treasury secretary and he agreed this summer. Regarding Mr. Obama’s determination to make health care reform one of his first priorities, Mr. Suskind says that many of the president’s aides worried that it would overextend an administration that was already facing two other huge tasks: steadying an economy still shaky from the catastrophic 2008 Wall Street meltdown and instituting financial regulatory reform (to ensure that a similar meltdown would not occur again). Mr. Suskind argues that the health care package that eventually passed — after months of bitter wrangling that further polarized the country — would be a watered-down version that did not really reform the medical delivery system or rein in costs through government-forced efficiencies as much as its proponents had hoped. The former chief of staff Rahm Emanuel once observed, “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.” In Mr. Suskind’s opinion Mr. Obama failed to use the sense of urgency that surrounded the economy when he took office in early 2009 (not to mention his leverage as a popular new president) to extract concessions from bankers and health care providers, thereby squandering two huge opportunities: substantially to drive down the ever-ballooning costs of health care and to grapple with the systemic problems that afflicted Wall Street and fueled the fiscal meltdown, including too much leverage, “too big to fail” institutions, sky-high executive compensation, and dangerous and poorly understood derivatives. By summer, Mr. Suskind writes, “fear had gone from both groups”: when members of “these two largest and most powerful interest groups, each at the center of the two great tests of the Obama presidency,” saw the president “up close, and poked at him a bit, they found he exhibited certain human frailties that might be easily exploited. What they also saw — many of them managers in banking and health care with long experience — were that his words were not being translated into action.” The president’s own assessment of his first two years in office? Mr. Suskind says Mr. Obama told him that he, along with Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter, shared “the disease of being policy wonks,” that he had been “very comfortable with a technocratic approach to government,” and that he needed to focus on the bigger picture. “Going forward as president,” he said in the February 2011 interview, “the symbols and gestures — what people are seeing coming out of this office — are at least as important as the policies we put forward.” -- Jim Devine / "Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti." (Go your own way and let people talk.) -- Karl, paraphrasing Dante. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
