Treasury This Moment
When Timothy Geithner was nominated by then
president-elect Obama to be treasury secretary, longtime associates
warned that the former Fed insider from New York was not ready for
the job. Terms such as “unimpressive,” “out of his depths,” and
“ill suited” were tossed around to describe the former Clinton
Treasury official. Others pointed to Geithner’s odd speaking manner
and his poor performances in testifying before Congress.
Now, much of the criticism of Geithner is being borne out,
acknowledge White House aides and former Obama Treasury Department
transition officials.
“We assumed that much of the [negative] commentary was the
result of sour grapes,” says one former transition team member. “We
took a lot of it with a grain of salt.”
Just how bad the pick of Geithner may turn out remains to be
seen, but the indications thus far is it could be Obama’s greatest
undoing given the central role the economy is playing in his
administration.
“People think Wall Street and our economy are in a mess? They
have nothing on what we’re going through here,” said a career
Treasury Department official after learning in early March that
former U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission member
Annette Nazareth had withdrawn from consideration
to serve as deputy treasury secretary. Nazareth’s decision came the
same day that Caroline Atkinson,
an International Monetary Fund senior official, also withdrew from
consideration as undersecretary for international affairs. The
women would have filled two of the four deputy secretary slots that
at press time remained unfilled.
At the time of their pullout, senior White House officials told
reporters on background that Nazareth withdrew from consideration
because initial feedback from the Senate was that she would endure
a tough confirmation process due to her role at the SEC directing
oversight of market regulation. But associates of Nazareth familiar
with the situation say that there were other reasons for her to
pull out. “She simply lost confidence in Geithner,” says a
colleague of Nazareth’s at the law firm Davis Polk &
Wardwell.
It was rumored in Washington that Atkinson’s decision was the
result of income tax issues similar to those that put Geithner in
such a difficult position during his confirmation fight.
The withdrawal of Nazareth and Atkinson left Geithner with no
senior aides focused on the economic crisis. “We have no one here.
There is no leadership,” says another senior career Treasury
official. “I’ve never seen anything like it. We have a secretary
who seems to have no understanding of what his job entails, and no
one in the White House seems either to know it or want to
acknowledge it. We have people making decisions who shouldn’t be
making decisions, and in positions where we should have people
making decisions about our domestic economy, our banking system,
and our Wall Street recovery plan, we have no one. People should be
alarmed by this, but no one seems to care.”
Screening Obama
The White House continues to look for ways to get President
Barack Obama back in his speaking groove. As first
reported by the The American Spectator (back on February
16), Team Obama won’t travel anywhere without a teleprompter to
guide Obama during speaking appearances, and is even looking into
how to hide video screens in podiums the president uses in the
White House. Those screens would allow advisers to scroll speech
texts, messages, and even statistical data or quick points to be
made by Obama in answering press questions. “The screens are
possibilities, but we’re also looking at some non-technology
alternatives,” says one White House adviser, who points to
President George W. Bush as a
good example. “For all the talk about what a lousy speaker he was,
he didn’t need a teleprompter very often. He used lots of notes and
formatted binders to pretty good effect. It wasn’t smooth, but it
worked for him; we’re looking at it.”
The thinking is that Obama is a good enough speaker who with
notes or a detailed set of talking points could be that much more
effective than Bush using those same tools.
Mission Accomplished
In early March, the Obama administration declassified a Bush
administration-era Justice Department memorandum written by staff
members in the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Policy and
the White House Counsel’s Office, excerpts of which made it appear
as though the lawyers believed that civil rights, such as freedom
of speech, could be suspended. The document was treated as yet
another smoking gun for the radical left in its campaign to prove
the Bush administration had sought to take liberties with the
American public when it came to civil rights.
Some Republicans—and even some congressional Democrats— credit
Shauna Daly with leaking the document. Daly, who
for about a month was ensconced in the White House Counsel’s Office
as its research director, didn’t stay long in that position. She
recently left that post, little more than a month after accepting
it, to become research director at the Democratic National
Committee. But DNC, White House, and congressional Democrats say
she was at the counsel’s office long enough, wasting no time going
through its reams of Bush administration documents related to such
matters as the firings of U.S. attorneys, the use of and internal
debate over the USA PATRIOT Act, FISA, and the Scooter
Libby and Karl Rove investigations, among
others.
“She saw everything, and who knows what she was able to scan and
pull out on data sticks,” says a Senate Republican Judiciary
Committee staffer. “We’ll find out soon enough when we see what the
DNC is putting out during [Sen. Patrick]
Leahy’s ‘truth committee’ hearings.”
Daly, according to White House staff, was often in her office
early and one of the last to leave the Old Executive Office
Building, which does not jibe with official White House claims that
Daly was not doing much in the office, which was one reason for her
leaving. Judging by the speed with which the DOJ document made it
into the mainstream media, it appears she got plenty of reading
done before she left.
Left Tech
Several left-leaning nonprofit or community-based groups are
seeking $250 million in funds budgeted in the stimulus bill for
high-tech or Internet projects to create what some Democrats in the
House and Senate describe as a web portal modeled on the
Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
“It would be a federally funded nonprofit entity, which would
fund national, state, and local websites designed to meet a public
need,” says one House member, who has been in a meeting with the
organization called One Economy, which is one of the groups seeking
money for the web-based project. “For example, if an organization
wanted to create a state-based website of educational materials for
its Hispanic citizens, the national online portal would be in a
position to fund it, and allow other groups or other citizens to
access the material.”
“It’s the kind of project that could become as important to the
Internet as CPB was to television; it’s a 21stcentury CPB if we can
get it off the ground,” says another House aide.
One Economy, and others, view the project as an organizing tool
around its issues. Its stated goal is to focus on getting high-tech
tools like high-speed Internet and computers into the hands of
lowincome individuals. But its political activities focus on such
issues as living wages, organized labor, nationalized health care,
and affordable housing, among others. ACORN is provided its own
links and resources on the One Economy website (one-economy.com).
Other organizations beyond One Economy are said to be seeking
funding for such a project, all of them with ties to organized
labor or the Democrat party.
