Maybe President Obama wasn’t expecting he would win a second term. How else to explain the squandering of three weeks of post-victory glory by defending a woman he may or may not put up as his nominee for secretary of state?
When it comes to crafting the next economic team, the White House is coming up even shorter.
It’s an open secret in Washington that the president’s first term was marked by mayhem in the ranks of his team of economic advisers, which one observer described as an “infighting mess.”
For starters, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner never got out of the penalty box after a disastrous debut at his Senate confirmation hearings in early 2009. No doubt he’d long be back in Larchmont had the president been confident a replacement would have made the cut.
So clearly, the election results of Nov. 6 give Team Obama time for a much-needed reboot on the economic-policy front.
Let’s start with who to head the Securities and Exchange Commission. Last week’s reports that the president is considering Sallie Krawcheck to be his new SEC chairwoman should raise eyebrows.
If nominated, Krawcheck would bring with her a whole truckload of baggage. That’s because from 2004 to 2007 she reigned as the chief financial officer of Citigroup, the bank at the heart of the housing and financial crisis. To put it simply, she was in charge of risk at Citi, not exactly what you would call a résumé-builder.
By the time Krawcheck left Citi in the fall of 2008, the bank was such a financial basket case that the Federal Reserve had to guarantee hundreds of billions of bad assets — assets that Krawcheck was responsible for overseeing, even as she took home tens of millions in compensation.
As David Weidner of Marketwatch.com put it succinctly: “She was in the room, I don’t know if she was the arsonist that burnt down the house, but she was in there.”
Is this the best the Obama administration can deliver for the next four years? Let’s hope the Krawcheck trial balloon never takes flight.