A brilliant yet rookie president without control of his subordinates. A technocrat faced with a house full of large personalities. A vessel of hope whose own staff has rocked the boat.
This is the portrait of the Obama White House we get from Pulitzer Prize winner Ron Suskind, who interviewed more than 200 insiders for his new book, Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington, and the Education of a President, profiling the president’s campaign and his first two years in office. The book is an ambitious attempt to weave together how Obama the campaigner and President Obama are one in the same—and to provide a diagnosis for his administration that can explain its shortcomings.
Ultimately, Suskind blames the president for a failure of managerial leadership. In making this point, Suskind succeeds where Bob Woodward failed in Obama’s Wars, giving readers a much broader look at Obama’s style of command, or lack thereof. Where Woodward focused on Obama’s relationship with military officials, Suskind maintains the financial crisis for the book’s narrative arc, detailing Obama’s interaction with his chief economic advisors. This makes the book a particularly timely read.
Yet much of Confidence Men is a collection of tales from the recent political past already told by other authors in much richer detail. For more on Obama’s wars, see Woodward’s recent work; for more on the 2008 campaign, see Mark Halperin and John Heilemann’s Game Change; on the collapse of Lehman Brothers, see Andrew Ross Sorkin’s Too Big to Fail.
Indeed, nearly one hundred pages of the book is devoted to a story that Suskind was required to retell: the daunting drum roll up to “Lehman weekend” and the dramatic meetings between Hank Paulson and the CEOs of America’s thirteen largest banking institutions. In light of other accounts published since the crash, Suskind’s narrative from within the White House often feels like it stalls in order to fill in unfamiliar readers. But for those readers, Suskind’s narrative might prove compelling and succinct.
Where Suskind provides true value added is with stories from within the halls of the White House itself, which are sure to satisfy politicos and age-old fans of the West Wing. In the days following the book’s release, White House officials have balked at its depiction of events. Larry Summers has called the book a “distortion,” Timothy Geithner said it is not a book of “reality” and Jay Carney dismissed it entirely.
But like any book on palace intrigue, a dose of skepticism is required; the walls may echo, and the reasons people talk are never clean of motive. Assuming some essence of truth has come out from most of Suskind’s interviews—and here we can give him the benefit of the doubt—Confidence Men is an impressive achievement.
Despite Obama’s admitted preference for the “technocratic approach to government,” Suskind’s thesis is that personality, not policy, has defined his struggle with the presidency. In his battle against Hillary Clinton, Obama fought to “own” his campaign and its message. The weaknesses revealed in that fight have been exacerbated, Suskind argues, as he has failed to “own” his own White House.
Obama had early advantages during the economic crisis, with advisors in the banking industry, as well as on the outside, warning months in advance of a market-based disruption. But the progressive economic advisors surrounding Obama during the campaign were replaced when he became president-elect with insiders who had contributed to the crisis at hand.
The kingpin of these advisors is the undisputable villain of the book: Summers, the former president of Harvard University. In a climactic moment, Peter Orszag, former director of the Office of Management and Budget, quotes Summers as talking over the president, in an occurrence allegedly symptomatic of Obama’s management.
“I’ll make my argument first,” Orszag remembers Summers telling Obama. “You can go after me.”
The president was interviewed numerous times, and his own thoughts may be the most revealing of all. Obama compares himself to Bill Clinton and, at his own political peril, Jimmy Carter, noting that all three of them are policy wonks, to their detriment.
Obama may be bent towards policy consensus. But his ability to find it in Washington is a different skill altogether.
Leave a Reply