Suskind’s ‘Confidence Men’ shows failings of Obama’s ‘team of rivals’

Note - you can't plagiarize Wikipedia. It's "open source".

From Yahoo News: Suskind’s ‘Confidence Men’ shows failings of Obama’s ‘team of rivals’
Barack Obama hadn't even won the Democratic presidential nomination when he began to publicly muse about the kind of White House he'd like to have as president.

"One of my heroes is Abraham Lincoln," the then-Democratic hopeful told supporters at a May 2008 rally, extolling the virtues of a Doris Kearns Goodwin book he'd recently read called "Team of Rivals." "Lincoln basically pulled in all the people who had been running against him into his cabinet because whatever personal feelings there were, this issue was, 'How can we get this country through this time of crisis?'"

The concept of hiring a "team of rivals" became one of Obama's best-known guiding principles when he later assembled a White House team. Much of the focus was on his decision to appoint Hillary Clinton, his onetime opponent, as his secretary of state, but Obama seemed influenced by the theory while picking other key members of this administration, especially his economic team.

Nearly three years later, Obama's embrace of an economic "team of rivals" appears to be one of the worst decisions he has made as president, putting him at serious risk of losing re-election next year. That's the biggest takeaway from Ron Suskind's new book, "Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington and the Education of a President."

Obama hired a gaggle of advisers who were notable for their competing viewpoints, presumably hoping that a diverse team could best help him guide the nation through an economic struggle that would come to dominate and largely define his presidency. Most of them were new to Obama world. And since the early days of his administration, the economic team has been fodder for stories of strife and dysfunction.

In "Confidence Men," Christina Romer, the former chairwoman of the Council of Economic Advisers, feuds with Larry Summers, the former director of the National Economic Council, whom she accuses of trying to sideline and undercut her. Summers has a falling out with Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner over a White House plan to prevent the collapse of Citigroup. ("Mommy and Daddy are fighting!" an unnamed Obama official says in the book.)

Summers, who served as President Clinton's Treasury secretary, feuds with anyone he perceives as trying to bypass him to talk to the president. When Peter Orszag, then-chairman of the Office of Management and Budget, sends Obama a memo urging him to tax financial transactions as a way to deal with the nation's fiscal crisis (a memo Obama requested), Summers explodes in anger.

"What you've done is IMMORAL!" Summers shouted, according to Suskind, a former reporter at The Wall Street Journal, where he won a Pulitzer Prize. Any memo to the president must go through the NEC first, Summers barked, no matter what the president says.

Later, when then-White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel forces Summers to apologize to Orszag, Summers tells Orszag that Obama is not up to the job of being president. "You know, Peter, we're really home alone here," Summers said, according to the book. "I mean it. We're home alone. There's no adult in charge. Clinton would have never made these mistakes." Summers has since disputed the quotes.

The book portrays Obama as a meek president who has been manipulated by aides who thought they knew better than him.

One well-publicized anecdote in the book suggests that Geithner willfully ignored a directive from Obama to put together a plan to restructure Citigroup, as a part of a larger restructuring of the banking sector.

Geithner has disputed the book's account, but Obama doesn't deny the episode happened—though he doesn't say what he told Geithner when he found out. "Agitated may be too strong a word," Obama says in the book, in an interview with Suskind.

The White House has been highly critical of the book this week. On Monday, Press Secretary Jay Carney went so far as to accuse Suskind of plagiarizing Wikipedia in parts of his account—which Suskind has denied.

But Suskind's account should not be shocking to people who read the news closely. "Confidence Men" merely backs up other complaints waged by current and former Obama administration officials over the past few years. Every White House faces internal conflicts and drama, but the book raises an interesting question: What if Obama had shelved his "team of rivals" idea and instead given more prominent roles to the people he already knew and trusted, like Paul Volcker, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve, and Austan Goolsbee, the senior economic adviser to his 2008 presidential campaign?

Obama has publicly said he's not a president prone to second-guessing, but even a student of history like him must occasionally wonder, "What if?"




___________
My Schedule of Regular Posts:
*Monday through Friday morning - schedules of President, VP and Secretary of State and her diplomats
*Monday through Friday afternoon - List of topics Limbaugh discussed on his program that day
*Monday through Friday throughout the day - My posts on anything that I feel like talking about. At least one or two a day, sometimes more.
*Saturday through Sunday morning - An addition to my booklist of political books - covering Democrats, Republicans and other interested parties.