COMMENT:THE BOOK ON BARACK
by Hendrik Hertzberg
.....
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. Had he demanded more but still got only what he ended up with, he might have received more credit for forestalling a depression and less blame for the feebleness of the jobless “recovery.” Chronically, within the White House and on Capitol Hill, he sought consensus as a starting point—the tranquillity of resolution without the catharsis of conflict.
“On the way to his inauguration, Obama got word that Republicans in the House had committed, as a bloc, to oppose his stimulus plan,” Suskind writes. A few pages later, he describes the newly sworn-in President as “a man with little experience wielding power but the fastest of learners.” The fastest? Not always. Obama took the oath of office determined to change the way things were done in Washington, by which he meant a turn toward civility, comity, coöperation, and mutual respect—honest debate and earnest, public-spirited compromise. He did not grasp how profoundly the transformation of the Republican Party into a disciplined, nearly monolithic agent of radical reaction and ruthless obstruction—a transformation that has only accelerated since that day—had changed things already. Perhaps he did not wish to grasp it. In recent weeks, though, he has surprised disdainful opponents and dispirited supporters alike with the passion and firmness of his drive for urgent job spending, responsible debt reduction, and equitable taxation. A President may learn more from the frustrations of power than from the wielding of it. But in this President’s case the learning has been perilously slow.
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http://www.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2011/10/03/111003taco_talk_hertzberg?mbid=gnep&google_editors_picks=true
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