http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2011/09/obamas_economic_quagmire_frank.html
This deserves a separate post of the devastating mistakes Obama has made as President from the new book publish by people who knew and worked with him.. a little snippet of the exchange in this book..by his own people and admirer's
A: I kept flipping back and forth between fury at Obama and — I know I'm easy — sympathy. So much of the damage comes from the initial decision to hire these guys, a decision he had to make almost immediately after being elected. He was inexperienced, he needed help, they burned him, he let them — that's the story in brief. The number of stupefyingly momentous decisions he had to make in those first few months put me in a vicarious panic. There was no obvious path, the way I read it — though in your view, I suspect, the choices were clearer. Though we'll never know for sure what other solutions might have worked, the book is a litany of missed opportunities, particularly with respect to financial reform (one banker after another wonders incredulously — and anonymously — why Obama didn't pin them when they were down). Would some other president have had more success?
One thing you're struck with is how bizarre it is that Obama has this job in the first place. Obama feels that too — and it gives him a deluded sense of his own magical powers. "Look, I feel lucky," he says. "Just look at me. My name is Barack Hussein Obama and I'm sitting here." He's cocky, but also kind of amazed. What an astonishing blend of good and bad luck the man has had — the unusual cocktail of circumstances that brought him to the White House, and the pretty much impossible situation he faced when he got there. Which is not to say it's not agonizing to watch him, in the book, fail time after time to make the big, bold move — the book is a narrative after all, and passivity (or, to be fair, caution), does not become a protagonist.
F: I have sympathy for him, too, and I have heard him express that (charming and genuinely modest) amazement that he ended up sitting in the White House, the most unlikely president imaginable. His turning to Rubin during the transition — as he hired his economic team — may have been out of some understandable human insecurity. Or was it because he's too easily impressed by the type of elite he met at Harvard? Whatever. But beyond the bad hiring choices, it was also a bad meta-policy choice, period, to put jobs on the back burner for eighteen months while pushing health care.
Suskind also nails, I think, Obama's intellectual blind spot. Indeed, Obama himself nails it, telling Suskind that he was too inclined to search for "the perfect technical answer" to the myriad of complex issues coming at him. What he'd end up with instead is, as Suskind astutely summarizes it, "clever" answers 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 said, could someone else have done better? Not the out-of-it McCain, not Hillary (an equivocator in her own right and one who would have embraced the same Clinton administration alumni and Wall Street crowd that Obama did). I still believe Obama was our best hope, and I still hope, however quixotically and self-deludedly, that he might learn from his mistakes.
This deserves a separate post of the devastating mistakes Obama has made as President from the new book publish by people who knew and worked with him.. a little snippet of the exchange in this book..by his own people and admirer's
A: I kept flipping back and forth between fury at Obama and — I know I'm easy — sympathy. So much of the damage comes from the initial decision to hire these guys, a decision he had to make almost immediately after being elected. He was inexperienced, he needed help, they burned him, he let them — that's the story in brief. The number of stupefyingly momentous decisions he had to make in those first few months put me in a vicarious panic. There was no obvious path, the way I read it — though in your view, I suspect, the choices were clearer. Though we'll never know for sure what other solutions might have worked, the book is a litany of missed opportunities, particularly with respect to financial reform (one banker after another wonders incredulously — and anonymously — why Obama didn't pin them when they were down). Would some other president have had more success?
One thing you're struck with is how bizarre it is that Obama has this job in the first place. Obama feels that too — and it gives him a deluded sense of his own magical powers. "Look, I feel lucky," he says. "Just look at me. My name is Barack Hussein Obama and I'm sitting here." He's cocky, but also kind of amazed. What an astonishing blend of good and bad luck the man has had — the unusual cocktail of circumstances that brought him to the White House, and the pretty much impossible situation he faced when he got there. Which is not to say it's not agonizing to watch him, in the book, fail time after time to make the big, bold move — the book is a narrative after all, and passivity (or, to be fair, caution), does not become a protagonist.
F: I have sympathy for him, too, and I have heard him express that (charming and genuinely modest) amazement that he ended up sitting in the White House, the most unlikely president imaginable. His turning to Rubin during the transition — as he hired his economic team — may have been out of some understandable human insecurity. Or was it because he's too easily impressed by the type of elite he met at Harvard? Whatever. But beyond the bad hiring choices, it was also a bad meta-policy choice, period, to put jobs on the back burner for eighteen months while pushing health care.
Suskind also nails, I think, Obama's intellectual blind spot. Indeed, Obama himself nails it, telling Suskind that he was too inclined to search for "the perfect technical answer" to the myriad of complex issues coming at him. What he'd end up with instead is, as Suskind astutely summarizes it, "clever" answers 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 said, could someone else have done better? Not the out-of-it McCain, not Hillary (an equivocator in her own right and one who would have embraced the same Clinton administration alumni and Wall Street crowd that Obama did). I still believe Obama was our best hope, and I still hope, however quixotically and self-deludedly, that he might learn from his mistakes.
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