The Education of a President

It was the summer of 2007. Presidential aspirant Barack Obama, then a political long shot for the White House, was really just an asterisk on the political scene. It was his 46th birthday. He got a call from one of his financial advisers Robert Wolf, who was ensconced on a massive $12 million yacht where a hedge fund manager had just finished  describing a once-in-a-lifetime impending financial collapse. Wolf wanted to alert Obama, "to make him see what I am seeing from where I am standing."

Wolf carefully detailed a grim future. Then he wished Obama a happy birthday, "Yeah, right, happy birthday," Obama said after hearing Wolf's bleak description. But the bad news seemed to enliven the candidate. Maybe real changes could be made in the way America did business.

Obama was surrounded by not one, but 2 economic "dream teams," according to author Ron Suskind, who dubbed the groups Team A and Team B. Team A was headed by economist Paul Volcker. Volcker and his group advocated that Obama, once elected, could use the crisis to create needed fundamental change in the way banks and Wall Street did business. Team B, headed by economic adviser Larry Summers, whom Suskind describes as a colorful "character in search of a good novelist," pushed to first "do no harm," that the financial markets are self-correcting and the situation would take care of itself., Suskind said that eventually Team B "sort of pushed Team A out of the way."

Suskind, who appeared at an Inside Media edition at the Newseum today, said the lack of activity after Obama's election was a missed moment. "You could have had a fundamental Rooseveltian  change. He (Obama) had a 70% approval rating. He arrived on the surf of yearning. He had extraordinary political capital. He was a Prometheus not bound," Suskind said.

Instead, Obama, tried a "let's all get together and work this out tactic and that was the wrong path," Suskind said.

During his talk, Suskind discussed 2 of the more controversial aspects of his book, Confidence Men; Wall Street, Washington, and the Education of the President. One was where Summers was supposed to have said: "We're home alone. There is no one in charge. Bill Clinton never would have done that." The other was detailing a belief on the part of female White House workers that they were being treated "as a piece of meat" and being asked to carry out their duties "in a hostile work environment."

Part of the initial problem, Suskind said, is the difficulty of being President and running the massive White House operation. "Four years before Obama had been a state senator sharing 1 staffer with another senator and now he found himself at the center of the most complex management organization in the world," Suskind said.

"I think the 1st year was a year of real chaos," Suskind said. "Obama showed all kinds of pre-game aptitude, but he couldn't imagine what exactly it would be like to be president. People saw in him what they felt they needed to see. He kind of got the wind knocked out of him. But he ramped up a learning curve faster than anyone could imagine. You could see him everyday growing into his fullness."

Tales, Tidbits, and Tips
During the question and answer portion, Suskind was asked what might happen to the economy if President Obama gets re-elected. "The betting line right now is that he is in pretty good shape. He is certainly more like Roosevelt in '37 than Hoover in '29. If he wins, it could be viewed as a fresh mandate and he would get another 100 days to push his plans." Suskind cautioned, however, the business world makes a tough opponent. "We are really a nation of 2 capitols," he said. "Washington is the political capitol and New York is the financial capitol. New York has a technical clarity and influence peddling is the business of Washington. You have to fight the currents. It takes real courage."