So John Lew has trouble remembering things.
Surely the Senate was right to confirm the president’s chief of staff as his new Treasury secretary. Indeed, we can’t think of a man who is better suited to succeed Tim Geithner — or more in keeping with the pattern of Obama nominees.
Yes, the dear boy did come across as frightfully forgetful when members of the Senate Finance Committee asked him about, say, the $1.4 million loan he received from New York University when he was an executive there.
Seems that the man who will soon be overseeing dollar accounts in the billions and trillions couldn’t recall what interest rate he was charged.
Nor did he know whether that loan, which the university ended up forgiving, amounted to a special deal. And he didn’t even try to explain why, as an NYU executive vice president, he made more than the man he presumably worked for, NYU President John Sexton.
Fortunately for this New Yorker, the path of forgetfulness had been forged by the time his nomination for Treasury was put forward.
He can thank his predecessor, Geithner, whose own nomination was temporarily sidetracked when it turned out that the man who’d soon be in charge of the IRS had somehow forgotten to pay it $34,000 he owed in back taxes.
Lew’s forgetfulness also fits with some Obama picks who didn’t make the cut.
Remember Tom Daschle, the former Senate majority leader who had to withdraw his bid for Health and Human Services secretary after it emerged that he’d forgotten to report and pay some of his taxes?
Or Nancy Killefer, whose nomination as chief performance officer was likely derailed over taxes she forgot to pay?
Clearly what we have here is not the exposure of an embarrassing lapse in memory but confirmation of a proud new standard.
As Hillary Clinton put it so forcefully during her own appearance before the Senate, “What difference, at this point, does it make?”