[T]he question at the heart of Suskind’s book is much more interesting: Who is Barack Obama, and what exactly did he want to do with his presidency?
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Whatever happened with Citibank, it’s clear that at every turn, Obama made choices that protected the Wall Street status quo, and Geithner was behind every single decision . . . Geithner worked hard to protect the debt machine and its masters [. . .] One prominent banker tells Suskind his colleagues expected much harsher treatment from the Obama administration in the administration of TARP and other decisions. “For Washington to not demand anything when it saved us, even stuff that we know is for our long-term good, was one of the stupidest moves in modern times … I feel like I should go over and hug Tim. It’s a shame we can’t pay him, 'cause that’s a guy who really earned a big-time bonus.”
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Some of the book’s most unsettling revelations have to do with White House sexism, or maybe it’s best described as “guyism,” as in Obama just misses the way his guy culture leaves out women, however inadvertently. Most of the juicy stories have already been dissected – and denied, not convincingly, by some of the women involved: Anita Dunn saying the White House would “fit all of the classic legal requirements for a genuinely hostile workplace to women”; Christina Romer complaining she was overlooked and undermined so often by Larry Summers she “felt like a piece of meat”; a “women’s dinner” convened by Valerie Jarrett to allow the president to hear the complaints of his top female staff directly.
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Suskind offers one telling anecdote about Obama’s approach to gender that’s been overlooked in coverage to date. Early in the book, during a campaign strategy session on candidate Obama’s economic program, he and his advisors discuss the continuing erosion of jobs and wages for low to moderately skilled male workers. The big job opportunities, one researcher explains, will be in the exploding realm of healthcare – positions for nurses, hospital orderlies and in-home assistants to frail seniors will boom.
Obama jumps in: “Look, these are guys,” he says. “A lot of them see health care, being nurse’s aides, as women’s work. They need to do something that fits with how they define themselves as men.” Quickly the conversation turned to infrastructure: fixing the nation’s crumbling roads, bridges, schools and public buildings. Men like to build, the group concludes, and infrastructure offers a campaign promise that promotes employment, improves our public roads and buildings, and makes working-class men feel better about themselves. . . . I could shrug off Obama’s “guyism” in that conversation about “women’s work,” if only he’d had the courage to follow through and push a program that would create jobs, fix what needs fixing and shore up male employment. Instead, we have unconscionably high unemployment, plus a window into the president’s retro view of “men’s” and “women’s work.”
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Suskind frequently stops mid-narrative to grapple with the central question of his book: Was the problem mainly with Obama’s staff, which can be corrected by a staff shakeup, and with the president’s early inexperienced leadership, which can be ameliorated by experience? Or is there something missing in Obama himself, in his vision and values, that led to the lack of bold action to solve the nation’s biggest problems?
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On the question of whether the problem is with Obama’s political values and priorities, or just his lack of leadership experience, Suskind doesn’t seem sure himself. He closes the book with a picture of a president who’s been “educated” on the ways of the White House, a picture that reassures Suskind a little.