what are barack obama's flaws?

they should use more internet abbreviations amirite

tevs

let me b real srs w/u

make no mist8k

and j0hn by that i mean "tevs" could be the entirety of his nobel speech

what I don't get is why everyone feels so deceived (in:re economic appointments, etc.)?

otm, and that's my only problem with taibbi's article. the sense of betrayal is weird. surely matt taibbi never expected obama to be anything but an establishment incrementalist? yes there was some populist speechifying in the campaign, but there was from mccain and palin too, so what? if you looked at obama's record or read anything serious about his economic views, it was obvious there wasn't much rooseveltian about him (fdr or teddy). there was a reason he got all that money from wall street. i mean, i'm not saying i'm not disappointed; just that i expected to be. taibbi's right on the facts, but sort of wrong on the whole WE WUZ TRICKED thing.

Taibbi's a muckracker though: he's supposed to generate outrage.

Also, like all good writers, he remembers his audience. His pieces run in Rolling Stone, which has always been yay-Obama and the last bastion of complacent liberalism.

oh i know, and i'm glad he's out there. i just don't believe that he personally feels deceived by obama, because i think he's too smart for that. and that sort of undermines the outrage in that article.

where i find Taibbi weak, though, is on just HOW we should have handled the financial world and the economy post-Lehman Bros. -- does he think we should've just let AIG and Goldman Sachs go under (a libertarian/Republican back-bencher view) or something else?

i felt that the gist of what he was saying is that Obama shouldn't have appointed them all to run the economy and tossed his campaign economic advisers to the wayside once he got elected. i also read that as one of the main sources of outrage.

but summers and rubin were campaign economic advisers. obama had a whole bunch of different people. and goolsbee and volcker are still advisers too, in lower-profile spots (which i think was true in the campaign as well). there isn't this big difference between obama the candidate and obama the president that that article is trying to make it appear. i'm sure there were a lot of people who weren't really paying attention to all that during the campaign, there was lots of personal projection about who obama was and what he believed, but if you look at any in-depth discussions of his ideas during the campaign -- like this one -- you hardly get the sense that he was lying about anything or that his ideas have changed very much. the major thing that's happened since that article came out, obviously, was lehman brothers and the collapse and the bail-outs. and people are going to be hashing that whole thing over forever, but obviously that was where the wall street guys really got the upper hand in designing policy, starting with paulson and continuing on through geithner. it's all pretty appalling, but it's not very surprising.

for the rec, I went to some Brooklyn Library discussion btwn Taibbi and David Rees (the Get Yr War On guy, who'd done some door-knocking for Bam) last December, and in front of a 98% Obama-lovin' crowd, I don't recall either of them raising the possibility that BHO's aim was to be a biz-as-usual prez.

had nobody actually looked at his list of donors? that site's called open secrets for a reason.

I'm racing through Andrew Sorkin's Too Big to Fail to meet a reviewing deadline this week, but what really galls is how incestuous this world is (Geithner, Jon Corzine, Paulson, Summers all worked together).

the best and the brightest.

you would never suspect there could be such as thing as regulatory overreach

He really should give you a job, primo shit-shoveling

I'm just saying that Taibbi tends to be a bit one-sided, and I'm not too crazy about the way he deploys facts in an intentionally misleading way. For instance, he dismisses the CFPA with a statement about how exemptions were given to the vast majority of banks, but he never mentions the facts that the banks who were exempted were the many small, local banks that only add up to a relatively small percentage of the total consumer banking market. The big national banks with the biggest market share are covered. I think that's a pretty notable accomplishment, but Taibbi makes it sound like a joke. It doesn't fit in with his view of government as basically a fat-cat conspiracy to defraud the rest of the country.

I don't understand all the outrage with using people with Wall Street backgrounds. These people know where the bodies are buried. FDR appointed Joe Kennedy to be in charge of the SEC. Anybody knows that Joe Kennedy made his money gaming the stock market. FDR believed that it took a crook to know a crook.

I knew someone was going to make that analogy, cuz I've puzzled over it myself. The difference here, micheline, is that instead of one Joe Kennedy you have seventeen.

xpost
its like any social scene. "ex-":(wall street firm)::"ex-":(local indie rock band)

if Taibbi really wanted to play to his audience, he should ask them why their belief in Obama was just as superficial as most Bush supporters' belief in Bush. I feel better knowing Obama is in the White House than Bush but the fact that people are voting on projections and impressions and not on actual policy decisions means that if anyone who is elected actually gets anything substantive done, it will be pretty incidental to the rationale that allowed that person to be in the position to accomplish those things.

Taibbi is just justifying the ignorance that got us here, and incidentally marginalizing progressive voices who argued that this was going to happen in the first place by writing from the perspective of this "surprise" instead of from the perspective of "intelligent people knew this all along but you folks ignored them as if the only purpose of their alarmist viewpoints was to 'harsh your buzz'".

Yes, but these people probably are more useful than some one with no Wall Street background.

I should also add that many of those people worked in the Clinton administration which was a time of great prosperity.

Actually the Geithner/Obama connection goes back to Geithner's dad, who ran the Ford Foundation and was friends with/boss of Obama's mother.

I knew someone was going to make that analogy, cuz I've puzzled over it myself. The difference here, micheline, is that instead of one Joe Kennedy you have seventeen.

― Hell is other people. In an ILE film forum. (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Saturday, December 12, 2009 4:22 PM (13 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

what?

omg ppl know each other

ive argued with gabbneb on the internet but i certainly hope that doesnt retard my future career options

im sympathetic to the idea that some of these dudes are philosophically not really helping things esp w/r/t employment numbers but i should hope u guys can come up w/ something a lil more specific -- say, motives -- instead of this guilt-by-association inference b.s.

im not saying this because i think there isnt any other reason, but because i would genuinely like to know if there is

I don't like seeing the "revolving door" in action between Wall Street and government - or between any regulated industry and government. It definitely creates an appearance of possible conflict of interest. And I do wish there was a better representation in among Obama's economic advisors of non-financial people - it would be nice to see more "real" business leaders in government. I mean people like Warren Buffet, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and so on. However, I don't think that people like Larry Summers, Rahm Emmanuel or even Tim Geithner are really such Wall Street insiders as this article makes it sound. Yes, I know that Emmanuel and Summers both made a lot of money in brief stints at financial firms - but I wouldn't assume that they feel beholden to the industry in general because of that. They never spent a lot of time inside that culture. Geithner was always a government guy - a regulator. He's never worked for a Wall Street firm, as far as I know. He knows those guys, since he was their regulator, but I'm not sure he's really "one of them".

'OMG ppl know each other' is pretty much the tinder for Taibbi's box.

Remembering the primaries, I recall there was a ton of pressure for former members of Team Clinton to hold off on throwing their weight behind Obama while Hillary was still in play and people who were very young serving Clinton were getting the pitch hard from both sides.

yeah but for lefties "omg ppl know each other" when it's a repubican admin gets re-coded as "fuckin cronyism of the worst kind, backscratching/logrolling has no business in the public sphere, these ppl are shameless" etc etc

kinda gross imo

but of course the president is above all that, he doesn't even resemble every other politician ever in any way

um john cheney cutting deals for oil buddies isnt exactly the same thing

yeah but for lefties "omg ppl know each other" when it's a repubican admin gets re-coded as "fuckin cronyism of the worst kind, backscratching/logrolling has no business in the public sphere, these ppl are shameless" etc etc

kinda gross imo

That talk only occurred during the era of Bush II because it was true, i.e., Hurricane Katrina.

well cronyism of the worst kind is when you have some demonstrably unqualified bozo like michael brown or bernie kerik in a position of real responsibility solely because of who they know or how good they are at stroking their bosses' egos. cronyism of the not-worst-but-still-bad kind is when you choose demonstrably qualified people (which i think summers, geithner et all are) but you choose from a small, incestuous pool where everyone knows everyone and not enough diversity of experience or opinion is available. that's more like the obama econ model.

hellzapoppa,

The problem is groupthink not the fact that these people came from Wall Street.

is that really the case ? what happened to the team of rivals

xpost: the problem is both. but that's what i mean about diversity of experience and opinion.

J0hn, you really can't infer that I haven't worked out that Barack Obama's connections are similar to other politicians', so am wishing you wouldn't.

Yeah wrt Wall Street, in as much as you need poachers turned gamekeepers in an organization, you really shouldn't allow it to become a case of roulette players turned dealers.

the "team of rivals" idea seems much more true in foreign policy, where there does seem to be real debate and push and pull. and also, i think obama feels more confident in foreign policy, he understands it more, and so is maybe more comfortable presiding over a wide-ranging debate. economics is more of strange land to him, and that plus what seems like the summers-geithner combo's sharp elbows -- summers in particular is obviously a steamroller -- i think has hurt.

so with all that it'll be interesting to see who the next treasure secretary is, since that's a post that tends to rotate every 2 or 3 years. (jamie dimon? yikes.)

See, I am not econ-ish and really hate Summers for misogyny (but sometimes that's quite enough).

See, I am not econ-ish and really hate Summers for misogyny (but sometimes that's quite enough).

"These people know where the bodies are buried" = "We'll see the REAL Clinton in his second term!"

THEY ARE REFORMING FUCKING NOTHING.

we did see the real clinton in his second term -- a gladhanding incrementalist who couldn't keep it in his pants.

suzy I was more talking to deej for whom cronyism in the obama admin = "well of course, what are you, an idealist?" as vs. in a republican admin "oh this is some bullshit"

it is the same fucking bullshit.

Taibbi is just justifying the ignorance that got us here, and incidentally marginalizing progressive voices who argued that this was going to happen in the first place by writing from the perspective of this "surprise" instead of from the perspective of "intelligent people knew this all along but you folks ignored them as if the only purpose of their alarmist viewpoints was to 'harsh your buzz'"

I don't get this at all. Like I said earlier, Taibbi writes for readers of Rolling Stone, which put Obama 67888 times on its cover; moreover, he's explained the problems with subprime loans, hedge funds, and the erosion/extinction of Glass-Steagall better than anyone I read. That's why I called him a muckraker: he's a populist, and populists almost always use gaucheries and hysterical prose. Someone needs to point out these compromises with Crayolas, and he's done a damn fine job of it.

the "team of rivals" idea seems much more true in foreign policy, where there does seem to be real debate and push and pull. and also, i think obama feels more confident in foreign policy, he understands it more, and so is maybe more comfortable presiding over a wide-ranging debate. economics is more of strange land to him, and that plus what seems like the summers-geithner combo's sharp elbows -- summers in particular is obviously a steamroller -- i think has hurt.

i'm not so sure that Obama really is all that out-to-sea wr2 economics as all that. i remember throughout the campaign how he and his campaign people talked about how he'd developed ties w/ and adopted ideas from the University of Chicago -- not the right-wing/libertarian Milton Friedman-types, but folks like Goolsbee and Cass Sunstein (both of whom ARE in the Obama Administration) and Obama's interest in behavioral economics. i also think that it means something that there ARE folks w/n the Obama Administration who don't fall directly in line with the Geithner/Summers way of thinking (even if, for the moment, they've been pushed aside).

financial reform bill passed the house, the wh is pushing it cos the problems are, as always, in the senate

wr2 geithner, i keep the term "stockholm syndrome" in mind. no, he didn't work for Goldman Sachs and spent just about all of his formative years as a regulatory bureaucrat (so he isn't as directly conflicted as, say, paulson or anyone else who initially worked on Wall Street). but still, his job as a regulator meant that he was in regular contact w/ Wall Street folks and their way of thinking became very familiar (maybe TOO familiar) to him.

Digby posted this LRB shattering account of the Obama administration's record thus far.

Obama is sufficiently humane and sufficiently undeceived to take no pleasure in sending soldiers to their deaths for a futile cause.

Evidence, please.