This Weekend’s Big Read: Obama’s Incompetent Economics Team

This weekend, the thing to read is the long article in the New York Times Magazine, “The White House Looks For Work”, which reports on the backstage shenanigans of the Obama administration’s economics team.

Sara Carlson, salesclerk.

Written by Peter Baker, the Times’ White House correspondent (so how hard-ball do you actually think the piece is going to be?), his article is extremely pro-Obama—which paradoxically highlights how incompetent the Obama economics team really is. For instance, the appraisal of Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner:

At 49, Geithner is relaxed and confident, prone to using words like “cool” to describe esoteric economic ideas, and is so well liked within the administration that he is universally known simply as Tim. He is a surprising survivor, given the lacerating criticism of his early days in office, but he bonded with Obama, who was born just two weeks earlier, and emerged as the strongest figure on the economic team, even if not its most effective public spokesman.

Like the Obama administration itself, the piece seems enamored of the idea that poor communication of policy initiatives is why Obama’s numbers are down—not actually, y’know, poor policies.

The bottom line on what the piece reveals: The Obama administration has no idea how to get the country out of the rut that it’s in. There’s lots of talk about “policy initiatives” and such—but no genuine direction. No world-view. No cogent sense of what caused the crisis, and therefore what needs to be done.

In other words, in the absolutely best case scenario, the next two years will be a collosal waste of time—assuming America muddles along, and there is no major crisis.