Fall from grace

Barack Obama is not up to the job. That is Ron Suskind’s oft-repeated contention. The President, he states, compromised with, rather than curbed, failing American financial institutions, and has surrounded himself with warring staffers who are either no more competent than he is or, if expert, disregard his wishes.

Following a picture caption that reads ‘Obama showed real weakness in managing his own White House,’ Suskind, a Pulitzer Prize winner, justifies his title:

The confidence of the nation rests on trust.Confidence is the immaterial residue of material actions: justly enforced laws, sound investments, solidly built structures . . . . Gaining the trust without earning it is the age-old work of the confidence men.

Suskind maintains that

just a month and a half into Barack Obama’s presidency, theWhite House was slipping into a kind of dysfunction. As the President tried to rise to the demands of his job, the White House was increasingly being directed by a back-channel union between two forceful men: Rahm Emanuel and Larry Summers.

(Neither is still in the President’s service.)

When Emanuel was Obama’s first chief of staff, American banks ‘were sitting on huge piles of toxic mortgage-related assets, according to the President, which put a drag on the flow of credit and created wider uncertainty in the economy.’ Nonetheless, Emanuel insisted that any news from the White House must be positive. Here he addresses his staff:

‘Everyone shut the fuck up. Let me be clear — taking down the banking system in a program that would cost $700 billion is a fantasy.’ He threw a hard glance at [Treasury Secretary] Geithner. ‘Listen; it’s not going to fucking happen. We have no fucking credibility. So give it up. The job of everyone in this room is to move the President, when he gets back, towards a solution that works.