A presidency approaching meltdown
Examiner Editorial
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March 22, 2009
President Barack Obama told CBS News’ “60 Minutes” yesterday that he still has confidence in his embattled Treasury Secretary, Timothy Geithner, and would refuse his resignation if it were offered. Not only is that clearly the wrong answer concerning the President’s most important cabinet appointment, it is also the latest and most disturbing evidence that the Obama administration is approaching political meltdown. Geithner’s credibility is gone because he has not been honest about when he first learned of those controversial AIG executive bonuses. Did he first learn about the bonuses two days before he told Obama, as the White House claims, or was it a week or more before that, as claimed by AIG’s interim chief executive, Edward Liddy? And what about the March 3 congressional hearing in which Geithner responded knowingly to questions about the bonuses put to him by Rep. Joseph Crowley, D-NY? By the way, the bonus total is, according to Crowley during the same March 3 hearing, not the widely reported $165 million but more than $218 million to 343 employees this year and another $230 million to 407 employees in 2010. Geithner’s various explanations should not obscure the fact that he almost certainly had to have known about the bonuses even before he became Treasury Secretary, since he helped during the Bush administration create the bailout program under which they were paid.
But even if Geithner departs today, there remains the troubling reality that the President is getting it radically wrong on the issue he repeatedly described until only last week as the most serious economic crisis this country has faced since the Great Depression. Either Obama doesn’t have a coherent policy to address the crisis or he does but it is a product of a radically leftist, anti-capitalist mentality that substitutes blind ideology for clear thinking. The former possibility is suggested by the latest delay in announcement of the details of TARP II, the long-promised Obama-Geithner revision of the Bush Toxic Assets Recovery Program plan for dealing with the rotten sub-prime mortgage-backed securities that allegedly caused the economic crisis in the first place. (Today’s announcement of a proposed Public Investment Corp. is clearly meant to deflect criticism of the continuing lack of plan detail).
Pointing to the latter explanation is the administration’s new proposal to put government bureaucrats in charge of executive compensation across Wall Street, the banking industry and possibly other industries. Focusing on how much hedge fund managers and commercial bankers are paid won’t fix the economy. But it could be the last straw that convinces reasonable people beyond the Washington Beltway that this administration is simply not up to the task.
