Over the years, Tim Geithner has come in for a lot of well-deserved criticism: for putting banks before homeowners, for lobbying for Citigroup when it wanted to buy Wachovia, for denying even the possibility of taking over failed banks, and so on. The release of his book, whatever it’s called, has revived these various debates. Geithner is certainly not the man I would want making crucial decisions for our country. But it’s also important to remember that he was only an upper manager. The man who called the shots was his boss: Barack Obama.
That’s the theme of Jesse Eisinger’s column this week. I’m on Eisinger’s email list, and he described the tendency to focus on Tim Geithner—while ignoring the role of the president—as “If only the Tsar knew what the Cossacks are doing!” I wasn’t familiar with the Russian version, but I’ve always been fond of the seventeenth-century French version. In September 2009, for example, Simon and I wrote this about the financial reform debate:
“During the reign of Louis XIV, when the common people complained of some oppressive government policy, they would say, ‘If only the king knew . . . .’ Occasionally people will make similar statements about Barack Obama, blaming the policies they don’t like on his lieutenants.
“But Barack Obama, like Louis XIV before him, knows exactly what is going on.”
And I reused that phrase as the epigraph for the short article I wrote for the Harvard Law Review (which I blogged about yesterday).
In his column, Eisinger describes Geithner as a foot soldier in an administration full of hesitant bureaucrats who “compete to see who can bow more quickly to what they perceive as the political realities of the moment.” Obama took particular pains to stand behind Geithner throughout his term as treasury secretary. Whom should we blame for that?
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