Tim Geithner's/Barack Obama's Plan to Lose the 2012 Election

While I cannot get enthused about any of the potential GOP presidential candidates, some are beginning to worry that Barack Obama and his advisers - Tim Geithner in particular - may be on the way of throwing the 2012 election to the GOP. To me, it's part and parcel with (1) Obama's refusal to act as a leader and (2) his never ending desire to appeasing his enemies in the GOP rather than supporting the interests of those who put him in office. I shudder at the prospects of a GOP president (especially given the inherent insanity of the current GOP line up), if Obama ends up being a one term president, he will have largely brought defeat down upon himself. Salon has an article that looks at the latest Obama/Geithner effort to lose the 2912 election. Here are some highlights:
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Zach Goldfarb's much-buzzed-about Washington Post profile of Treasury secretary Tim Geithner boils down to this: Geithner was and is the primary architect of the Obama administration's pivot from the economy to the deficit. Furthermore, since Geithner now reigns supreme on economic policy, there is zero chance of any change of direction in the next year. All the advocates for greater attention to boosting economic growth and job creation in the short term -- Christy Romer, Jared Bernstein, Austan Goolsbee, and even the much-hated-by-progressives Larry Summers -- are gone.
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[A]s is already clear from the initial campaign salvos from credible Republican presidential candidates such as Mitt Romney and Tim Pawlenty, the 2012 election is going to be a referendum on the economy.
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By ruling out any further stimulus -- and, even worse, by abandoning efforts to keep the economy growing far too early -- Geithner has helped to make Obama and the Democrats extremely vulnerable in 2012. If Republicans take the White House and the Senate in 2012, then it really won't matter whether Geithner's deficit pivot could have preserved "the capacity to do a whole range of things that are really important." Healthcare reform will be dead. Banking reform will be dead. Medicare and Medicaid will face a deeply uncertain future.
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Geithner doesn't deserve all the blame here. Obama picked him and Obama backed him to the hilt. . . . the electoral problem for Obama may not hinge on whether or not the president has the actual power to make manifest his will on job creation, but rather on whether he is perceived to be trying. Is he giving it his best shot? Is he making it clear to the general public what constraints have been placed on him by the opposition party and external events?
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The answers are no, and no. . . . . It's going to be a tough platform to run on, if the economy continues to slump as the campaign heats up.