Obama’s Katrina Moment: The Teleprompter President Hit From All Sides

Frank Rich was one of those big time pundits back in the Democratic primary who, failing to notice Barack Obama’s total lack of relevant experience for the office of president, repeatedly documented his school-boy infatuation with the One in his NY Times op ed while stooping to new lows in trashing Hillary Clinton.

Reading Rich’s column this morning feels like vindication: fewer than 100 days into the Obama Administration, and our media good old boy is asking the question, “Has a ‘Katrina moment’ arrived?”

Rich begins:

A CHARMING visit with Jay Leno won’t fix it. A 90 percent tax on bankers’ bonuses won’t fix it. Firing Timothy Geithner won’t fix it. Unless and until Barack Obama addresses the full depth of Americans’ anger with his full arsenal of policy smarts and political gifts, his presidency and, worse, our economy will be paralyzed. It would be foolish to dismiss as hyperbole the stark warning delivered by Paulette Altmaier of Cupertino, Calif., in a letter to the editor published by The Times last week: “President Obama may not realize it yet, but his Katrina moment has arrived.”

Rich continues:

Six weeks ago I wrote in this space that the country’s surge of populist rage could devour the president’s best-laid plans, including the essential Act II of the bank rescue, if he didn’t get in front of it. The occasion then was the Tom Daschle firestorm. The White House seemed utterly blindsided by the public’s revulsion at the moneyed insiders’ culture illuminated by Daschle’s post-Senate career. Yet last week’s events suggest that the administration learned nothing from that brush with disaster.

Otherwise it never would have used Lawrence Summers, the chief economic adviser, as a messenger just as the A.I.G. rage was reaching a full boil last weekend. Summers is so tone-deaf that he makes Geithner seem like Bobby Kennedy.

Bob Schieffer of CBS asked Summers the simple question that has haunted the American public since the bailouts began last fall: “Do you know, Dr. Summers, what the banks have done with all of this money that has been funneled to them through these bailouts?” What followed was a monologue of evasion that, translated into English, amounted to: Not really, but you little folk needn’t worry about it.
Yet even as Summers spoke, A.I.G. was belatedly confirming what he would not. It has, in essence, been laundering its $170 billion in taxpayers’ money by paying off its reckless partners in gambling and greed, from Goldman Sachs and Citigroup on Wall Street to Société Générale and Deutsche Bank abroad.

Summers was even more highhanded in addressing the “retention bonuses” handed to the very employees who brokered all those bad bets. After reciting the requisite outrage talking point, he delivered a patronizing lecture to viewers of ABC’s “This Week” on how our “tradition of upholding law” made it impossible to abrogate the bonus agreements. It never occurred to Summers that Americans might know that contracts are renegotiated all the time — most conspicuously of late by the United Automobile Workers, which consented to givebacks as its contribution to the Detroit bailout plan. Nor did he note, for all his supposed reverence for the law, that the A.I.G. unit being rewarded with these bonuses is now under legal investigation by British and American authorities.

Within 24 hours, Summers’s stand was discarded by Obama, who tardily (and impotently) vowed to “pursue every single legal avenue” to block the bonuses. The question is not just why the White House was the last to learn about bonuses that Democratic congressmen had sought hearings about back in December, but why it was so slow to realize that the public’s anger couldn’t be sated by Summers’s legalese or by constant reiteration of the word outrage. By the time Obama acted, even the G.O.P. leader Mitch McConnell was ahead of him in full (if hypocritical) fulmination.

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BTW, I wasn’t the only way who noticed that Rich has changed his tune about Obama. Here’s a reader’s response to this morning’s column:

It is nice to see that Mr. Rich has finally demanded some tough answers from his idol. The supposed change that Obama and others (including Deval in MA) promised us appears to have lost its sheen. We now see that Obama and his gang are no different (worse in fact) than the Wall street moghuls that ruled during the Bush years. All this talk of accountability and getting the bonus back is just that - talk. They will lay low for a few weeks until the next story comes along and then it will be business as usual, swindling our money in bucketloads. The super rich and their minions who control the strings in Wall street are just playing their frat poker games, but this time it is with our money, trillions of it! Meet the new "changed" administration, same as the old administration!

— BAY, Boston, MA

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