Clearly there are many areas where the election has and will make a difference. Economic policy and the response to what even Obama sees as the worst economic crisis in decades is another story. The Bush team offered us Wall Street insiders that helped Wall Street insiders. And Obama - as I've been saying for a while - is doing the same. Sure we were stuck with Robert Rubin (thankfully), but the Summers/Geithner combo plus the teams of Citibank and Wall Street insiders is only more of the same. For the most critical issue of his time, Obama opted out of change and delivered same old, same old. How much longer do we have to be subjected to this obviously failed approach?
From Robert Kuttner at HuffPost:
Which brings up the question: where in this affair is the president who hired Secretary Geithner and at whose pleasure the embattled treasury secretary serves? For the moment, President Obama is standing by his man, something he has to do until the moment that Obama decides to ease out Geithner, work around him, or fire him.
The problem, of course, is larger than Geithner. The entire Obama economic team is far too close to Wall Street and far too much a continuation of the Paulson approach. And though Geithner is primed to take the fall, the plan is the work of senior economic strategist Larry Summers as much as it is Geithner's.
The grave political and economic risk is that Obama continues to let Summers and Geithner lead him down the garden path; the industry-oriented mortgage rescue saves too few homeowners; housing remains in the doldrums and mortgage securities with it; the hedge funds and private equity companies make some money with government guarantees, but the banking system remains comatose; and Republicans increasingly become the instruments of public anger.
For the moment, the president is a prisoner of this thinking and these appointees. If this were merely The West Wing, it would be the stuff of terrific drama. But alas, it's reality; and we all will live with the consequences.
In a different possible scenario, however, Obama lets the financial and political marketplace test the Geithner plan for another week or two. Then, when its failure is palpable, Obama announces a dramatically different approach, either with or without a different treasury secretary.
