Will anyone listen to new controller?
What won what where
And not just by the White House. Slate's Jacob Weisberg, obviously no fan of author Ron Suskind, lays out some particulars:
Suskind has now turned his egregious writing and dubious technique on the Obama administration in his new book, Confidence Men. Once again, his work is strewn with small but telling errors. Here are a few: The Federal Reserve is a board, not a bureau (Page 7); Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner was previously president, not "chairman," of the New York Fed (Page 56); he was, however, an undersecretary of the treasury, which Suskind makes a point out of saying he wasn't (Page 172); Horatio Alger was an author, not a character (Page 54); Gene Sperling didn't play tennis for the University of Michigan, because he went to the University of Minnesota (Page 215); the gothic spires of Yale Law School, built in 1931, are not "centuries old" (Page 250); Franklin D. Roosevelt did not say of his opponents, "I welcome their hate" (Page 235). What FDR said at Madison Square Garden in 1936, was "I welcome their hatred." That nuance wouldn't matter if it weren't such a famous line, but getting it wrong is the political equivalent of an English professor misquoting Hamlet's soliloquy.
The Washington Post's Ezra Klein isn't a fan either, although for different reasons:
Suskind is much better at reporting internal dysfunction in the White House then assessing alternative paths forward for the economy. He never really deals with the technical problems of bank nationalization, for instance. Geithner is assumed to be wrong rather than proven to be wrong. And yet I know that many of the internal players who initially believed Citibank should be nationalized have come to conclude that Geithner had it right. There are arguments on both sides of that debate, of course. But this is where the real questions of the last three years lie. If the recession had been smaller, or Europe hadn't imploded, and we were on a path down to sub-8 percent unemployment, the White House might have been equally dysfunctional, but they would look a lot better. Suskind's book is better at making them look bad then explaining where they went wrong.
Earlier: New book on Obama's economic team is not flattering