CapitalistImperialistPig

So far, Süßkind is a heck of a storyteller. The story of the great crash and Obama's campaign are both told as a series of mainly personal vignettes - clearly the remembrances of major and some less major players. These are personal stories, but the central narrative is always in the background, and the parts of the story we get are those experienced by the players we hear about. So far this has been mostly the story of how the looming catastrophe was gradually apprehended by a few bankers and economists close to the industry. These Cassandras suffered the usual fate of their clan - they were ignored, or mocked, or fired, but a few managed to keep thier heads above water and even save a bank or two. Obama had friends and advisors among this group, and was probably the first prominent politician to have even a murky picture of the impending crash. At first, though, both he and his advisors saw it as something fairly far ahead - something that might happen in the middle of his s...

Not exactly sure why I find this song irresistable - I've never been beyond O'Hare.

Lumo and Krugman point me to Drew Westen's New York Times essay . Lumo, Kevin Drum and Andrew Sullivan don't like it, but Krugman does, and so do I. Westen's central point is that a good leader needs to have a narrative, a story, which incorporates and exemplifies what he wants to do and where he is taking the country. Teddy Rooseveldt and his nth cousin FDR understood that. So did Ronald Reagan and Jack Kennedy. Obama doesn't. Like me, Westen is surprised that Obama, known for eloquent speech and one of the best literary stylists to reach the Presidency, doesn't seem to grasp that he needs to lead by word more than deed. Westen no doubt puts off the conservatives with the somewhat rabble rousing content of the narrative he imagines for Obama, but even a quite different narrative would be fine if he could just articulate it coherently. Westen: When Barack Obama rose to the lectern on Inauguration Day, the nation was in tatters. Americans were scared and ang...

I don't share Cynthia's belief that Obama is simply an evil tool of malign forces, but I am extremely disappointed in him. Fouad Ajami has a theory: Obama is a pessimist . In one of the illuminating, unscripted moments of the 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama said—much to the dismay of his core constituency—that the Reagan presidency had been "transformational" in a way that Bill Clinton's hadn't. Needless to say, Mr. Obama aspired to a transformational presidency of his own. He had risen against the background of a deep economic recession, amid unpopular wars in Afghanistan and Iraq; he could be forgiven the conviction that the country was ready for an economic and political overhaul. He gave it a mighty try. But the transformational dream was not to be. The country had limits. Mr. Obama couldn't convince enough Americans that the twin pillars of his political program—redistribution at home, retrenchment abroad—are worthy of this country's...

Matt Damon recently noted that he had given up on seeing any audacity from Obama. His decision to run for President, with hardly any revelant experience was certainly audacious, but he seems to have spent every last cent of his audacity there. To be sure, he inherited terrible problems not of his making. Unfortunately, it seems that he has always been cautious where boldness was needed - on the economy, on Iraq and Afghanistan, and now on the turbulent events in Africa and the Middle East. While he dithered, Quaddafi has had time to regroup, muster his superior firepower, and now looks like a plausible winner in his civil war. His timidity on every issue makes him look like a weak President. Maybe he needs to read some Hamlet - ...and thus the native hue of resolution is sicklied over with the pale cast of thought....

Conventional Democratic wisdom, at least until recently, was that Obama was playing 3-dimensional chess, and we peasants just couldn't appreciate the subtlety of his moves. Lately, though, it's starting to look like the man is playing in a couple fewer of dimensions and can't quite figure out why his pawn can't move any more. Is there any area in which he hasn't disappointed? Even his triumphs, health care and the stimulus, were born crippled and badly advertised.

It's not a secret that my disgust with Obama has been growing, but this crap with Peter Orzag, a former cabinet member deeply involved with the bank bailout, negotiating for a position with Citibank pushed me over the edge. If this isn't a crime, it sure as hell ought to be.

Is Paul Krugman impressed with Obama's freezing of federal worker's salaries? I'm going to say not favorably: Yep, that’s exactly what we needed: a transparently cynical policy gesture, trivial in scale but misguided in direction, and in effect conceding that your bitter political opponents have the right idea.. It could be that Obama is just very conservative economically, heavily influenced by the Chicago School at which he taught. I tend to think though, that this battle is not one he wanted to fight anyway, so acting first might not have been a terrible idea, but Krugman's point that Obama is doing nothing to construct a credible narrative for intervention in the economy seems indisputable.

I continue to be shocked at Obama's failure to lead on economics. Paul Krugman: John Boehner, March 2009: It’s time for government to tighten their belts and show the American people that we ‘get’ it Barack Obama, yesterday: “At a time when so many families are tightening their belts, he’s going to make sure that the government continues to tighten its own,” Obama said. “ We’ll never know how differently the politics would have played if Obama, instead of systematically echoing and giving credibility to all the arguments of the people who want to destroy him, had actually stood up for a different economic philosophy. But we do know how his actual strategy has worked, and it hasn’t been a success. You can't campaign for stimulus and belt tightening at once - not and make any sense anyway. My worst fear is that he actually realizes this, and has given up on trying to makes sense. After all, Bush and Palin never made sense in their lives and they seemed to do OK. Suppose Obama h...

I just read economics correspondent David Leonhardt's interview with Obama in the New York Times magazine, and all I can say is that it sure is nice to have a President who isn't an idiot. One can no more imagine W sitting for a hour long one-on-one with an economics correspondent than singing Don Giovanni , but Obama did. His answers to Leonhardt's question are typically long, thoughtfull, and well-informed. The last paragraph shows the pragmatist in sharp relief against the ideologue with the singularly stupid gut: What I’m very confident about is that given the difficult options before us, we are making good, thoughtful decisions. I have enormous confidence that we are weighing all our options and we are making the best choices. That doesn’t mean that every choice is going to be right, is going to work exactly the way we want it to. But I wake up in the morning and go to bed at night feeling that the direction we are trying to move the economy toward is the right one...

Honest, eloquent, nuanced and thoughtful. It might cost him, especially with the stupidocracy.

An Obama anthem ?

While you slept, Brad DeLong notices a slime trail, picks up The Politico's Mike Allen, analyzes the same , dissects the perp and pickles him in formaldehyde. Mike, it seems, imagines in his dimwit mind that he has found an inconsistency in Barack Obama's name story. Friday at sundown is a fitting moment to take note of a particularly pathetic piece of Journamalism from Mike Allen at the Politico. You see, Mike Allen begins his trashing of Barack Obama. Understand: Mike Allen isn't doing the trashing--oh no no no. Mike Allen is just saying what the critics of Obama will say. Let's give Mike the mike, and watch him take his dive: The Politico : Barack Obama’s free ride is ending.... Obama’s about to endure a going-over that would make a proctologist blush. Why has he sometimes said his first name is Arabic, and other times Swahili?... [T]he long knives will be out for Obama.... Officials at the top of both parties calculate that Obama has risen too fast... “vapid plat...