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A Presidency in Peril: The Inside Story of Obama's Promise, Wall Street's Power, and the Struggle to Control our Economic Future ReviewPaul Kuttner gives disillusioned Obama voters the vocabulary to understand why the President who instilled such hope in 2008 leaves us so cold in 2010. While the administration chases increasingly unpopular ancillary goals, Americans worry about their pocketbooks, and watch Obama's economists squander his mandate by protecting the people who created our mess. President Obama lets the noble goal of bipartisanship trump actually getting anything done.
Kuttner, a political economist, dissects specifically the administration's poor fiscal choices in its first fourteen months. He isn't a historian, polemicist, or journalist; he presents no illusion of completeness or reportorial balance. Kuttner doesn't deny that he wishes Obama were more proactive and Keynesian, and that he's urging the President further to the left. He writes in hopes that Obama can reclaim the initiative and turn a failing economy around.
This book spares no personalities. Kuttner's chief enemy isn't the Republican minority, but the Robert Rubin branch of the Democratic party. Rubin as much as anyone bears personal blame for the current snafu, but Obama's economic team is dominated by Rubin protégés. Instead of boldly wading in to repair the deeply damaged economy, Obama has stayed hands-off, letting Rubin, Geithner, and Bernanke molly-coddle those who created our economic mess.
Massive TARP funds stopped mega-banks from hemorrhaging money, but did nothing about the institutional gangrene that created the problem in the first place. The administration has kept the executives who created the mess in charge of the banks they destroyed, falsely claiming helplessness as the execs award themselves end-of-year bonuses totaling more than the banks' net revenues, bonuses only possible through direct transfusions of taxpayer money.
Meanwhile, regional banks that followed rules see their securities turn to worthless paper, and go into receivership, thanks to trickle-down sleaze. Supposed fire-breathing populists like Barney Frank write cut-rate gifts to the most rotten banks, while voices like Sheila Bair and Elizabeth Warren, standing for responsibility and reform, find themselves in the margins. The rot is bandaged but not repaired. And our President seems strangely absent as this continues.
It doesn't have to be this way. Kuttner looks back to FDR, Lyndon Johnson, and even George H.W. Bush for examples of Presidents who stood against economic chicanery. And he turns to two Democratic Presidents for examples of how an administration can recover after initial serious missteps. Will the Obama administration, he wonders, resemble another Bill Clinton, or will our President redeem himself with the populist efficiency of Harry Truman?
Movement progressives looking for a voice to unite themselves against the interests should read this book. It provides the facts, the names, and the patterns that made our mess possible. And it urges a clean break with the past, a break Obama refuses to make. Perhaps this is the knowledge we've needed to stop sitting on our collective hands and reclaim the initiative we enjoyed two years ago. Robert Kuttner offers the hope Barack Obama did once upon a time.
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