From THE DAILY BEAST
…That’s why the concern here isn’t what the book tells us about Geithner. It’s not completely clear from press accounts whether Geithner directly countermanded an order about Citi. In its article from last week, the Associated Press called Obama’s directive an “order to consider.” I often order my 14-month-old daughter to consider making less of a mess while eating. So who knows what that even means. But it does seem clear that once he learned that Geithner ignored this option, Obama didn’t do much of anything about it. And, well, Geithner does still have his job.
That’s the problem the book reveals. Adam Moss and Frank Rich of New York magazine did get an early copy and read it, and in an online dialogue posted over the weekend, they home in on what Rich calls Obama’s “intellectual blind spot.” Obama even recognized it himself, telling Suskind he was too inclined to look for “the perfect technical answer” to problems; Rich quotes Suskind as writing that Obama always favored policies that were “respectfully acknowledging opponents’ positions, even those with thin evidence behind them, that then get stitched together into some pragmatic conclusion—but hollow.”
That sounds awfully apt to me. Obama was afraid to be the president. He listened to a dozen viewpoints and tried to come up with something that made everyone happy. Unfortunately, “everyone” included people on his team who were looking out for the banks more than for the public (or for their own boss), and it included people on Capitol Hill whose clear agenda was Obama’s political destruction. It’s the central—and depending on how the next election turns out, possibly decisive—paradox of this president: In trying way too hard to look presidential in the sense of “statesmanlike,” he has repeatedly ended up looking unpresidential in the sense of not being a leader…
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