More Bad News About Dysfunction in the Obama White House

As previously noted on this blog, James Carville came out raising Hell with Obama and suggested firings of White House staff and an urgent need to reset the agenda and the president's response to a GOP that seems to be controlling political conversation - at least as it exists nowadays in Washington. Now a piece in The Daily Beast looks at Ron Suskind’s new book Confidence Men and what will likely be a very unflattering image of a Barack Obama not even in control of his own staff and a man driven to try to please everyone all of the time and doomed to please most people - at least in the Democratic party base - none of the time. If the book's contents are as described, it will explain a great deal about a president who refuses to be a leader and who seems to be steering the Democrats(and the nation) toward disaster. The big question is whether or not Obama will wake up and try to change course. Here are some column highlights.

Confidence Men also confirms what we knew about Obama’s White House: that the president appointed the wrong economic team from the start, failed to crack down on the banks, and was Solomonic to a fault when formulating responses to the financial crisis (oh, and news flash: Larry Summers is hard to work with!).

But the indictment goes one mortifying step deeper: Geithner and Summers and Rahm Emanuel, and perhaps others, sometimes ignored Obama, refused to carry out his orders, and, in Summers’s case, mocked him, saying at one point to then-Budget Director Peter Orszag that “there’s no adult in charge” in the White House. And while I don’t yet know whether Suskind emphasizes this point, let’s carry the critique one step further: They did so, as far as we know, without suffering any consequences at all.

That’s the problem the book reveals. Adam Moss and Frank Rich of New York magazine did get an early copy and read it, and in an online dialogue posted over the weekend, they home in on what Rich calls Obama’s “intellectual blind spot.”

Obama was afraid to be the president. He listened to a dozen viewpoints and tried to come up with something that made everyone happy. Unfortunately, “everyone” included people on his team who were looking out for the banks more than for the public (or for their own boss), and it included people on Capitol Hill whose clear agenda was Obama’s political destruction.

What now? Fire the staff, as James Carville suggested last week? Actually, that couldn’t hurt, especially in Geithner’s case, and probably in Bill Daley’s (the apparent real target of Carville’s arrow). A dramatic gesture can help push the reset button. But it’s important that if they be replaced, they be replaced with the right kinds of people. Obama needs people who will push him to go against his instincts toward consensus. Tell him everything he doesn’t want to hear.

Most of all, remind him, and impolitely if need be, that there are millions and millions of Americans who invested great hope in him, and he has let them down. Let them down terribly. I wonder if anyone has ever uttered this deeply sad and plainly true sentence to the president’s face. If not, it’s high time.