Kevin Drum makes an interesting point about the Ron Suskind book:
Was Barack Obama a naive waif who came to Washington untested and unready, and then struggled to control his White House staff? That's the portrait Ron Suskind paints, and to a certain extent I imagine it's true. In fact, I imagine it's true of every president. There's just no training position for the presidency, and no one walks into the job fully prepared.
And then he quotes an interview of Jonathan Alter, who wrote a more sympathetic book about the Obama White House:
ALTER: I have a whole chapter in my book where I talked to all the former Clinton people who now work for Obama. I asked them all, compare Clinton and Obama.
ANCHOR: They said?
ALTER: They gave a sophisticated answer. They thought Clinton was more creative and his policymaking, but they prefer to a person Obama in a crisis, which was what they were in. He was decisive and making as many decisions in a week as Bill Clinton made in a year, and making the decisions crisply. The idea that somehow all the former Clinton officials working for Obama were longing for Bill Clinton because they had this inexperienced president who didn't know what he was doing is not what they were saying at the time.
Right. Like the last president, this one is plenty willing to make decisions. Unlike the last president, he likes to hear various points of view before making a decision. But if he calls you in for advice and then he takes someone else's advice, how are you going to feel? If President Obama then makes the wrong decision-- and his ask on the stimulus package was definitely too small-- what are you going to say about him?
That he got rolled due to inexperience, maybe? Ah, but that's kinda silly. The last administration to go thru a similar economic downturn was Franklin Roosevelt's. Not much hands-on experience just sitting around. Nor did he run on the platform that he'd be the right guy to have at the helm during a severe recession. Obama's goals are long-term and trend toward the moralist, which is quite at odds with Larry Summers' summation of the situation:
(T)he central irony of financial crises is that they’re caused by too much borrowing, too much confidence and too much spending and they’re solved by more confidence, more borrowing and more spending.”
That's how I see it and I just don't think President Obama is comfortable with that particular irony. Frankly, I think he chose to listen to the advice he thought would be good for America in the long run, ten and twenty years out. Like Drum and Karl Smith, I don't buy this notion that Obama got rolled. If he'd seen himself as the Infrastructure President, then we'd have the stimulus we need. He didn't, we don't.
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