president summers

White House/Souza.

There is a book published this week that may have a quite devastating effect on perceptions of Obama's presidency, at least in media circles and possibly among the wider electorate too. Ron Suskind has written a book about this White House's first two years, with a focus on the handling of the economic crisis. Suskind wrote one of the most perceptive and damaging books about the Bush presidency (he garnered that deathless quote about the 'reality-based community'). Like Bob Woodward, he has an uncanny knack of not only getting top sources to meet him but to be marvellously indiscreet. He's worked himself into the perfect position for a political journalist: everyone feels they have to talk to him because they know that everyone else is talking to him. So, for this book Suskind talked to everyone, including Obama, with whom he spent fifty minutes in the Oval Office.

Obama will be repenting that at leisure, for the picture that Suskind paints of his White House is not one that he or his supporters will enjoy reading. This discussion of the book, by Adam Moss and Frank Rich at New York magazine, gives you a good idea of what it contains. In brief, Obama comes out looking like a hapless ingenue entirely at the mercy of three powerful, ruthless and aggressive advisers: Larry Summers, Tim Geithner, and Rahm Emanuel. The three of them pursued their own agendas, together or in conflict with each other, and each felt quite able to ignore the wishes of the man behind the Oval Office desk or, more subtly, to ensure that his wishes matched their own.

Summers (right, above) emerges as Obama's very own Gordon Brown: a brilliant mind and a fierce in-fighter, possessed of an absolutely implacable will to power. Like Brown he is emotionally tin-eared, routinely unpleasant to colleagues, and prone to acts of petulance. Also like Brown, he was much better at stopping things getting done (because they didn't originate from him) than at making things happen. He was finally called out by Pete Rouse, Obama's interim chief-of-staff, who wrote a memo to the president recommending that Summers be removed, for his "imperious and heavy-handed direction of the economic policy process." He was, but by then it was too late.

At least Tony Blair knew Brown well and had the confidence to fight their battles to a draw and even win some. But Obama was entirely unprepared for Summers, and Summers knew it. The quote from the book we're likely to hear over and over - right up until the 2012 election - is from Peter Orszag (on the left, above), who recalls Larry Summers saying to him after a meeting with the president: "You know, Peter we're really home alone. There's no adult in charge. Clinton would never have made these mistakes." Well, Clinton would almost certainly have made the mistake of appointing Summers, and she also showed herself, during the 2008 campaign, incapable of adjudicating between warring advisers. So I'm not sure she would have handled this any better. Summers was widely regarded as having the biggest economic brain in the country, he had great experience of governing, and the markets were reassured by him. So probably any Democratic president would have wanted him around during a crisis. But he was also a Grade-A shit, and in the end his shittiness proved more destructive than his undoubted talents were creative.

Geithner comes out just as badly. A subtler man than Summers, perhaps, but no less wilful, he more than anyone else is responsible for the absence of any meaningful financial reform on Obama's watch.

All this makes me reflect that we who supported Obama in 2008 were wrong, very wrong, to dismiss the value of experience. It matters - of course it does. No matter how smart you are, no matter how many smart people you talk to, and no matter how many you appoint, it takes years of governing experience to learn the strong instincts a president needs if he is to impose his will on the machine in the midst of the frenzy of governing. It may be that Obama has learnt his lessons and is all set up to be a first-rate president in his second term. But I wouldn't blame the American voters for deciding he hasn't earned a second chance.

Comments

[ejoch]

Do you think it's too late for a primary challenge? Over a year to go, after all.

[David_Dobbs]

This gets at some key and difficult points, Ian -- part of why it's such a painful read. (I mean that in a good way.) I'm conflicted about your conclusions. It sounds as if Obama is over his head, and that matches the impression his debt-ceiling retreat left, especially coming atop so many others. At a rally a week or so ago in Detroit, the crowd reportedly groaned when he said, of his jobs bill, "I still think the parties can work together." And it sounds like he was rolled by Summers.

So was it experience we needed (and should have voted for), or just more strength of character. Experience is important, of course; up to a point, the more the better. But it depends on the experience, and it was H Clinton's track record (esp her vote for the war, which she never honestly accounted for, and her own indecisiveness during the campaign, which you mention, that made me go with with Obama. And I did so because I HOPED he would grow into the sort of president that two other inexperienced presidents, Lincoln and FDR, did. Though one could argue FDR's experience as governor was critical; probably was. But he didn't seem all that strong a candidate for the job, and he, like Lincoln, grew into it.

I had hoped Obama would -- and maybe he will yet. Lincoln didn't look too hot 2 years in, either.

I'm obviously trying to defend/rationalize my support of him -- but also to add a caveat to your own on yielding to the temptation to think Clinton would have done much better here. Possibly. We'll never know.

There's just no pretty way out of this. I often think my country, which I love dearly, is broken. I hope I'm wrong.

[Lyle]

Could anyone fare well against this specific Republican juggernaut? Even someone with more experience? I doubt it. Hence, what is the benefit of Suskind's book? It's as if he's handed the Rabid Far-right an early Christmas pressie: "Here, guys, here are some damning quotes you can rub in voters' faces all throughout 2012! Milk those quotes for all they're worth. Have fun! Love, Ron."

Also, why do people credit Summers with having the "the smartest economic brain in the country" and "great experience of governing" when he is on-the-record such a massive turd?! Doesn't pathetically low emotional intelligence somehow cancel out his theoretical brilliance? How does Summers govern well when he (apparently routinely) alienates people he works with? I'm not challenging Marbury's description of Summers; rather, I'm flummoxed as to how Summers keeps so many people in his thrall after so many years of being a total w*nker.

[Ejoch]

Isn't Summers the guy who features in 'The Social Network', and afterwards made that comment about students in suits in the afternoon? Rather undermines his criticism of those guys, if he's really such a jackass himself.

[kjc]

I remember when all the "realists" were telling all the progressives not to complain about the economic team. Good times.