You might remember Roy’s comparison of President Obama’s economic policies to George W. Bush on steroids.
Joe Klein’s latest TIME column suggests he might agree.
[T]here are problems with the President’s new populist tack. The first is the OWS movement itself, which includes a generous measure of weirdos, ideologues and free-range troublemakers. A recent, unscientific New York magazine poll of 100 demonstrators found that 34% believed the U.S. government is no better than al-Qaeda. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the OWS protesters managed, before long, to destroy the credibility of a worthy political complaint in a spasm of puerile extremism. The other problem is the President’s credibility as an anti–Wall Street crusader. He has none.
Ron Suskind’s new book about the Obama economic policy, Confidence Men, has drawn a lather of complaints from the Administration and some journalists–and some of the dust is justified. …
… Obama went with the Wall Street establishment. He chose Timothy Geithner as Treasury Secretary. … Then Obama chose Lawrence Summers, who has a stratospheric intelligence–not always a good thing when it comes to finding real answers on Planet Earth–and the emotional intelligence of a gnat, as the head of the National Economic Council. In a previous incarnation, as Treasury Secretary, Summers pushed the Commodity Futures Modernization Act in 2000, which prohibited the government from regulating financial derivatives. That alone should have disqualified him from public service in a Democratic administration.