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A Presidency in Peril: The Inside Story of Obama's Promise, Wall Street's Power, and the Struggle to Control our Economic Future

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Paul Kuttner gives disillusioned Obama voters the vocabulary to understand why the President who instilled such hope in 2008 leaves us so cold in 2010. While the administration chases increasingly unpopular ancillary goals, Americans worry about their pocketbooks, and watch Obama's economists squander his mandate by protecting the people who created our mess. President Obama lets the noble goal of bipartisanship trump actually getting anything done.

Kuttner, a political economist, dissects specifically the administration's poor fiscal choices in its first fourteen months. He isn't a historian, polemicist, or journalist; he presents no illusion of completeness or reportorial balance. Kuttner doesn't deny that he wishes Obama were more proactive and Keynesian, and that he's urging the President further to the left. He writes in hopes that Obama can reclaim the initiative and turn a failing economy around.

This book spares no personalities. Kuttner's chief enemy isn't the Republican minority, but the Robert Rubin branch of the Democratic party. Rubin as much as anyone bears personal blame for the current snafu, but Obama's economic team is dominated by Rubin protégés. Instead of boldly wading in to repair the deeply damaged economy, Obama has stayed hands-off, letting Rubin, Geithner, and Bernanke molly-coddle those who created our economic mess.

Massive TARP funds stopped mega-banks from hemorrhaging money, but did nothing about the institutional gangrene that created the problem in the first place. The administration has kept the executives who created the mess in charge of the banks they destroyed, falsely claiming helplessness as the execs award themselves end-of-year bonuses totaling more than the banks' net revenues, bonuses only possible through direct transfusions of taxpayer money.

Meanwhile, regional banks that followed rules see their securities turn to worthless paper, and go into receivership, thanks to trickle-down sleaze. Supposed fire-breathing populists like Barney Frank write cut-rate gifts to the most rotten banks, while voices like Sheila Bair and Elizabeth Warren, standing for responsibility and reform, find themselves in the margins. The rot is bandaged but not repaired. And our President seems strangely absent as this continues.

It doesn't have to be this way. Kuttner looks back to FDR, Lyndon Johnson, and even George H.W. Bush for examples of Presidents who stood against economic chicanery. And he turns to two Democratic Presidents for examples of how an administration can recover after initial serious missteps. Will the Obama administration, he wonders, resemble another Bill Clinton, or will our President redeem himself with the populist efficiency of Harry Truman?

Movement progressives looking for a voice to unite themselves against the interests should read this book. It provides the facts, the names, and the patterns that made our mess possible. And it urges a clean break with the past, a break Obama refuses to make. Perhaps this is the knowledge we've needed to stop sitting on our collective hands and reclaim the initiative we enjoyed two years ago. Robert Kuttner offers the hope Barack Obama did once upon a time.

This is the book I thought I was buying when I bought the "valentine to Obama" by Jonathan Alter called "The "Promise." Alter's book, disappointingly, proved to be little more than a gift-wrapped package of apologies for Obama's meager accomplishments so far: all done without any serious policy analysis. Alter makes Timothy Geithner a hero?

Not so here. In this carefully researched nuanced brief, Kuttner is not afraid to call a spade a spade. He puts his analysis where his mouth is, and in doing so, provides some serious behind-the-scenes revelations bout the cabal responsible for the financial collapse, albeit from an avowedly progressive perspective. Thank god however, this did not turn out to be just another Obama apologia. As a "born-again ex-Obama supporter," I share the author's main concern: That our new President has spent all of his political capital chasing the "phantom of bipartisanism" by "hacking," "tacking" and "triangulating" his way to the right. In the process, he has had to cozy up to the Wall Street crowd, led by Bill Clinton's buddy, Robert Rubin, and also at the same time, has found it convenient to jettison his base: the progressives (like me) who "went to the well" for him during the election. Kuttner makes the point that once we progressives have elected Obama it is still our duty to help keep him honest? Well, excuse me? I thought that was precisely why we elected him? Why is it that the Republicans do not have to "keep their elected officials" honest, when we democrats do? Why do, once we have elected them, they get the religious bug to want to move to the "non-existent center?" All of a sudden, once elected, democrats (but not the Republicans) have found the new (non-existent) religion of bipartisanism?

So far, the Obama "rope-dope-for-hope" move to the center has gotten us nothing but an expanded insurance system written in big Pharma's sweet spot. As I recall there were no more than one or two Republicans who signed up to it, even though Obama gave away all of the items important to his base like the single-payer system, and the public option, etc. Stripped of its progressive features, I feel like Obama used his bipartisanism to pee on our leg and tell us it was raining?

Here, Kuttner has taken us deep into the bowels of the entire system of high-level financial corruption, and has made it about as transparent and as clear as it is ever likely to get in the U.S. Only the two hour pod cast by "This American Life" on the same subject has come close to making it clearer. What is NOT made so clear in this book however, is why Obama had to do it: why he had to ignore his base and move to the right where he got nothing in return? Is he just a "closet" neocon himself? Or, is he just paying back his `Big Dog" donors for their campaign contributions? Or, is it as his ex-Minister said: "Obama is just another Chicago politician?" Or does he think he can just continue to finesse us (his base) until 2012 rolls around and then give us a symbolic "song and a tap dance," show up in a few Black churches, with a new sheaf of "pretty speeches" and we'll just snap back in line? No chance this time.

Whatever is the correct answer, I agree with this author: that we are now in a multigenerational "Reagan type trickle-down holding pattern;" another Cheney/Bush jobless recovery. I also agree with him that we progressives need to get up off our duffs, stand up on our hind legs and bark back at Osama's "rope-a-dope-for-hope strategy." Its time to take to the streets and let the White House know we are not going to be "stiffed" any longer. Here Kuttner has identified the ringleader as Bill Clinton's financial guru, Robert Rubin. But I believe it is clear that the Rubin crowd, simply are picking the low hanging fruit: There simply were too few disincentives NOT to join the deregulated Wall Street orgy already in progress with Cheney/Bush. Said differently, they simply stole a couple of plays from the Cheney/Bush playbook. And voila, since the financial rescue package, it's been déjà vu all over again: continuing risky bets with our money, while the wall street pirates run out the "front door" with their pockets filled with mega-buck bonuses. For them, it is much more profitable to use our "TARP money" for risky credit default swaps that generate mega-million bonuses, than to lend to small banks that could then finance jobs for a speedy recovery. What happened to the idea of a common good on Wall Street?

So forget Osama's photo ops, we must continue to keep our eyes on the donut and not on the hole: What we see today, most flagrantly exposed in the Gulf oil spill, is just more of the same greedy, mean-spirited, shortsighted and short-term bottom line-at-all-cost piracy that we saw during the Cheney/Bush years. Only this time it's signed in blood in Osama's name, underwritten by his tendency to turn his head the other way and give us a new limp-wristed "pep talk." If this is hope that we can believe in, that audacious hope that he spoke of during the run up to the election, then we are as likely as not to see another serious crash in the economy before Obama's term ends. And Barrack Obama knows it.

It's the Corruption Stupid!

There is no way to fix what ails America from Osama's limp-wristed "audacious hope rope-a-dope" position: that is, with media spin, pretty speeches, demagoging the other side, and photo opts. What ails America is systemic corruption, as far as the eye can see. I know it; Obama knows it, and the American people know it.

The reason Wall Street is back up and "humming" while main street is still in the "intensive care" ward, and the "real" unemployment rate still hovers around 20 percent with no relief in sight, is the same reason we cannot fix the "credit default swaps;" it is the same reason the U.S Supreme Court expanded corporate contributions to a First Amendment right at a time that credit default swaps and illicit corporate money are the two key issues causing all of the nation's financial woes. It is the same reason that we have the Gulf oil spill: lax regulations bought and paid for by "Corporate USA Unlimited."

The systemic dysfunction in American politics is this: no matter how deep our problems get, the ruling cliques just keep using their illicit contributions to redefine their own crimes as "legal" and then, like a Mack truck, they just keep on running over the American people. In short, corporate corruption has eaten away the "protective coating" around America's democracy, and as a result, it is not only Obama's presidency that is in peril, our very system of democracy is seriously in peril as well. We are lethally exposed to a systemic evil that continues to metastasize.

Kuttner ends his very pessimistic analysis on an optimistic note. But his heart is not in it. He knows that while we thought we had elected a thoroughbred -- an intelligent leader with a backbone and a couple of cahones - what we got instead is just another Chicago politician. With the gulf oil crisis exposing his weaknesses and political nakedness even further, Obama has no choice but to bounce off the ropes trying to fight back as best he can. However, I believe it is too late. This President, for all the hope we had vested in him, is proving that he has been tarred with the same "corruption brush" that the Cheney/Bush crowd left us.

Kuttner has shown me enough. I am recalling my 2008 vote for Obama and am opening up a new "Rev Jeremiah Wright Institute for Political Reform" (across the street from Oprah's Harpo Enterprises). Nevertheless, this is a great book, for Kuttner shows here that while the American people may be down and out and almost powerless to change the system, we are not at all fools. Five stars

The reporting in this book is excellent, the kind of detail about how President Obama has made his choices, filled his cabinet, and created his policy alternatives -- the kind of detail that used to be reported in long articles in the New York Times and Washington Post.

The tone of the book is mildly alarmist. The author is concerned that the Obama team has triangulated towards Wall Street, towards advisors that support power and money institutions, and away from clear principles. This judgement, popular among progressives, is premature.

I have always believed that the test of a policy, left or right, is whether it persists in a workable fashion. It is a temporary victory to pass a bill, to announce a reform. A signing ceremony may be a cool thing, but there is something called implementation that has been given short shrift among political reporters. They have essentially gravitated towards a sports reporting model, concentrating on whom is winning the moment. This book, as well sourced as it is, has a bias. That bias is not the unobjectionable progressivism of the author, it is the desire for closure, too early in the complex Presidency of Barack Obama.

Surely, the test of this President is whether financial reforms allow stable growth in the American economy, and not whether some organizations got richer? Surely the test for health care reform is whether it expands coverage and lowers or contains costs? Yet halfway through the first quarter, we have pundits calling "game over".

This book should have been a long, detailed article, and the title should have been "Obama: The First Quarter". To be fair, the author does note that the timing is early, and that Obama is on the brink, not in the tank. This book is, then, an attempt to reel the Obama administration back into the fold, to exercise a containment on Obama's alleged excessive bent towards compromise.

Let me suggest a title for a next book by this fine reporter, this excellent writer, this premature commentator: The Obama Years: Did They Work?" In the meantime, progress reports could be done, not in book form, but in magazine form. In other words, I wanted history, and I got in the moment journalism. The resulting sense of peril is over-stated, and may or may not be correct. A book length version of this analysis risks being untimely... I would say read this book now, but by January, 2011, it will be superceded by events, by performance, by implementation, succeed or fail.

Is the Obama presidency, in peril? Really? What an unusual pronouncement, especially less than a year and a half into it. But Robert Kuttner makes a fascinating case. His argument essentially rests in the delta between the promise of change, especially in economic policy, and the hope it engendered versus the realities of what has been accomplished. Anticipation versus accomplishment; that is the issue.

Kuttner, a political economist, offers an inside story of the first year of Barak Obama's presidency and finds that many of his campaign promises, as well as the expectations held for his leadership, have been dashed in the realities of the current political climate of deregulation and neoliberalism. The author presents a powerful indictment of the new administration, giving coherent voice to the many disparate criticisms of the economic policies of the president and his staff from the political left. He makes no apologies for his approach, instead he laments President Obama's failure to take immediate and decisive action to not only turn the nation's failing economy around, but also to effect regulatory fixes to the system.

He argues for more activist leadership by the administration, and explicitly invokes the presidents of FDR, LBJ, and others, including the Republican George H.W. Bush, as representative of more effective efforts. He also draws a comparison with President Bill Clinton, and urges that this new Democratic administration follow another path than pursued in the 1990s during the remainder of the term. He is concerned that Obama administration might lean too far toward the desires of Wall Street, as did the Clinton administration, and away from more "Main Street" concerns. Without question, Kuettner is sounding an alarm.

"A Presidency in Peril" might well be the book that Robert Kuttner was born to write. Sporting impeccable credentials as a journalist, editor, educator and economist, Mr. Kuttner's timely book gives voice to countless Americans frustrated by the failures of Barack Obama's early presidency. Importantly, the author also discusses how Obama might yet fulfill his promise by returning to working class politics.

Mr. Kuttner believes that the pressures of financing hotly contested campaigns in the primary and general elections helped push Obama into the arms of Wall Street. Once in the Oval Office, Mr. Kuttner contends that Timothy Geithner, Robert Rubin and Larry Summers orchestrated the Obama administration's bailout of the big banks. The author finds it distressing that Obama did not heed the advice of liberals who wanted him to take more decisive action to restructure the financial industry in a more fundamental way, fretting that as a result the U.S. is likely to endure a slow growth economy for many years to come.

As public disillusionment over Obama's political dithering grows, Mr. Kuttner suggests that Obama might do far better to emulate the populism of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the combativeness of Harry S. Truman. Worried that the political realignment of 2008 might disintegrate if no meaningful change is produced, Mr. Kuttner suggests that bread and butter issues such as living wage legislation can help roll back the Tea Party backlash by energizing working class voters.

Sure to be widely discussed, I highly recommend this intelligent book to everyone.

We are watching a frightful rerun of recent history, an insecure President imprisoned by simple-minded thugs. As Cheney and Rumsfeld were to Bush, so Summers and Geithner are to Obama. Obama may be more substantial and quicker than Bush. But he does not have a powerful family friend like Jim Baker to spring him from prison.

We now have many fine books on the liberation of Wall Street and its consequent shift away from financial intermediation toward promiscuous gambling and swindling (such as Dean Baker, Cassidy, Johnson and Kwak, Kotlikoff, Lewis, Rajan, Roubini and Mihm, Yves Smith, Stiglitz). Kuttner goes a step further, focusing on how Obama's thugs and their Congressional servants have blocked and undermined our return to financial law and order, and how wise heads in both parties are challenging them.

Arguably, the stakes are even larger than last time, for our dysfunctional and distrusted financial sector has greatly accelerated our decades-long economic decline, now so patent and palpable that even blind ostriches can see it.

Perhaps Kuttner's book will be to this administration what the Iraq Study Group Report was to the last one. Please do read it, Mr. President. You're a mensch. To escape from your prison, maybe you don't need Jim Baker.

Read this book, but take your blood pressure medication first. It will anger even the biggest cynic. Kuttner provides the very best account I've seen to date about the deep connections between Wall Street, politics and government. It provides a truly compelling and nuanced account about how our country has gone through a silent coup d'etat in which the largest financial institutions have captured American economic policy. I write about these issues everyday and thought I had seen it all. But I got angry all over again due to Kuttner's remarkable reporting and analysis. I have only one beef and it's with the title. The presidency is not all that's in peril. We all are.

Promises can prove hard to keep when the realities of power settle in. "A Presidency in Peril: The Inside Story of Obama's Promise, Wall Street's Power, and the Struggle to Control Our Economic Future" puts an eye onto the Obama Presidency as Robert Kuttner offers a through analysis of Barack Obama's first year in office. Even handed, he's critical of Obama's failures but still shows there is hope in his remaining years as the President settles into office. "A Presidency in Peril" is an enlightening and riveting read sure to please.

"Presidency in Peril" is an insightful critique of the failures of Obama's first year, chock full of inside information and historical comparisons.

* Although the Obama team had impressive financial support from small donors and although his machine carefully cultivated and perpetuated this impression, the majority of his donations eventually came from Wall Street.

* Although some of his early financial advisors were Keysian economists (Dan Tarullo and Paul Volcker), he eventually filled his cabinet with Wall street insiders and sympathizers. These are the people writing his financial reform package. "...by the time he clinched the Democratic nomination, his advisors had become a much narrower group, as the sides oriented toward Wall Street has efficiently elbowed out the progressives on Obama's team."

* Obama let Congress write the health bill and let Tim Geithner write the House version of the financial reform bill (kinder to Wall street than Kuttner would have liked). The House weakened it more and Senator Todd's version, with extensive input from Wall Street, is even weaker.

* Although Obama has strong progressive roots and although he has basic sympathies with unions, minorities of all types, and social programs - his methodology is that of building concensus, compromising, and working in a bipartisan manner. A Republican machine that is intent on discrediting him no matter what will not reward these (usually admirable) tactics with like behavior.

* When Bill Clinton rewarded the Republicans by moving to the right, he abandoned aggressive implementation of the progressive platform he ran on - yet Republicans continued to relentlessly dog him. Obama has emulated Clinton by indulging the Republicans and by filling his cabinet with Clinton appointees.

* Obama would do better to emulate Truman. Midway through the term he inherited when Roosevelt died, with his popularity in the basement, Truman quit catering to the Republicans and instituted a program that would finish Roosevelt's New Deal legislation - telling the American people the "do nothing" Congress was the enemy. "Unlike the greatest of presidents, he (Obama) has been oddly aloof - almost above the fray, instead of playing a dominant, defining role."

* India's Bernanke equivalent, Yaga Reddy, stood firm in the face of intense pressure from the gov'ts of Britain and the US, the world's large banks, and their Indian affiliates. He would not allow the complex financial instruments in India and persisted with old-fashioned reserve requirements. India almost completely escaped the global financial meltdown.

* It's not too late for Obama to change course and live up to the rhetoric of his campaign. Kuttner describes how he should do it. "Obama is free to toss out his top aides and bring in a new team. Bill Clinton repeatedly shuffled his advisors. So did Lincoln....Obama is nothing if not a learner....he has redefined himself more than once."

Kuttner's book shows how Obama's usual approach has proven too cautious with this hostile group of Republicans - he doesn't emphasize the beneficial effects of Obama's conciliatory nature. I'm personally torn between wanting ideal bills of progressive change versus appreciating Obama's style. Since Kuttner finished his book, Obama finally ended his futile quest for a bipartisan healthcare bill and put a win under his belt. Then he started what I thought was an aggressive campaign for reform on Wall Street. After reading Kuttner, I'm not sure it's enough.

For a long time, I have been (and so have the media) very confused by Obama's mixed messages. One day he is praised by the media, another day he is scathingly attacked. Obama, by nature, is enigmatic and keeps his cards, as the saying goes, close to his buttoned up vest. On a day-to-day basis, which the media is chained to, it is hard to know what to think of him. He goes up and down on the merry-go-round. I have read a number of books on him, but these books, often written in tattered language, ruined grammar, waltzing cliches, and jarring idioms, put me off. I could not believe them; I could not respect them. But finally comes this book, Robert Kuttner's Presidency in Peril--well-written and researched, honest and balanced, wise and measured, truthful and passionate--that I can respect and believe in. It opened my eyes, and it calmed my mind. At least, I get a sense of what's really going on, and what's at stake.

I thought of a metaphor that expresses what this book has done to me. I am in my house. Out of one window, I see cars passing back and forth; out of another window, I see an oak tree; out of the third window, I see a wall; out of the fourth, I see my neighbor's kitchen. In other words, I get narrow segments of the landscape, and they don't really cohere. Now imagine a helicopter coming down and taking me up to the mountain top. Now I can see everything: large swathes of green, irrigated lands; bushes and trees; roads snaking in and around cities; houses and tall buildings; snow drifts and ski resorts; rivers pouring into silent lakes; lights tumbling in the shadows; red and purple suffusing the setting sun; mountains, hills, and stars; and people walking, running, and laughing in secret roads. That's what this book did for me--it took me up and away from my narrow viewing, from my boxed windows, from my dark holes of ignorance. And let me say, perhaps it is the wrong view, perhaps I should turn around and look at the view on the other side of the hill, but for the time being, I trust this view.

So what does the book tell me? It is mighty hard to summarize such a rich book, but I'll try anyway.

At the very beginning of his introduction, Kuttner says that there are two kinds of presidents: transactional and transformational. Throughout the book, he makes many references to Roosevelt, Truman,and Johnson as transformational presidents. Obama, by contrast, is "the epitome of a transactional leader...a conciliator, bridge

builder, and post-ideological leader..." (xvii). Had Obama been president in a prosperous and peaceful era, "his mix of temperament, conviction, and governing style might have made him a great progressive president." However, "that cluster of issues, though important, was not the grenade that history tossed Barak Obama" (xvii). In the severe crisis that Obama confronted, transactional leadership means "capitulation." In the present political climate, Kuttner claims, a politics of accommodation, is a "fool's errand." And this is why: "For, even at the hour of its disgrace, Wall Street

continues to have a persistent lock on national politics. This hold is all the more remarkable given that excesses of Wall Street crashed the economy....Neutralizing the financial industry's pervasive power requires a president far more committed to radical change and hands-on leadership than Obama was in his first year" (xviii). A crisis, Kuttner continues, "requires a leader to look beyond the short-term obstructions and to mobilize the people. Instead, Obama appointed an economic team headed by Larry Summers and Tim Geithner, both with close ties to Wall Street." By contrast, Roosevelt "not only used the federal government to deliver relief but faced down the money moguls

and remade the financial system. Roosevelt carried Wall Street's hatred of him as a badge of honor" (xxi).

In Obama's two years in service, nothing has changed for the better: unemployment is rising, more houses are

drowning, the rich are not paying their taxes (because Obama caved to Republican pressure), and Wall Street is celebrating. When Wall Street understood that the president won't really fight them, "crony capitalism persisted." Obama may be "so totally captured by the financial elite that his path [may be] irreversible" (xxii). And furthermore Kuttner says, "After a year of pummeling by a Republican party determined to take no prisoners, Obama, almost pitiably, was still seeking an elusive bipartisan consensus" (xxiii).

What, according to Kuttner, would recovery look like? "Obama would first need to shrink Wall Street's influence, both inside and outside his own administration" (43). However, even though Wall Street kept giving its CEOs huge bonuses and refused to supply credit to small businesses and homeowners, "Obama seldom criticized the banks except on occasions when he needed a quick doze of symbolic populism" (44). And so, Obama's feeble response to the crisis protracted the mortgage mess. As Kuttner describes it, "Ten of millions [homeowners] found that their homes were suddenly worth less than the mortgages." Kuttner believes that in the absence of a strong remedy, "the foreclosure crisis would keep feeding on itself, glutting the market with vacant homes, driving housing values still lower, and triggering still more foreclosures" (49). Once more, Kuttner reminds us, "the comparison with the New Deal is instructive--and depressing, when one contrasts the boldness of Roosevelt with the timidity of Obama" (56). Here Kuttner reminds us, in detail, of Roosevelt's remedies. Kuttner also thinks that the whole argument about "nationalization" (which is what Sweden did in the '90s) is "a straw man. Nobody was proposing permanent government ownership of large banks" (63).

I've learned from this book about the Levin-Doggett bill (Tax Haven Abuse Act) "to increase the ability of the IRS to collect revenues improperly booked on offshore tax havens" (81). Closing this tax loop-hole, the US Treasury estimated, would bring in "at least $100 billion a year" (82), more than the cost of the Obama health reform. However, according to Kuttner, "corporations and hedge funds mounted a massive campaign to kill the proposal." Obama made no effort to support it. (I knew nothing about this before I read the book.) Finally, Kuttner asserts, "the perception that Obama is closer to Wall Street than Main Street is more than an image problem--it's reality" (83). Kuttner goes on, for several chapters, to substantiate this point, with detailed evidence and end-notes.

Another worthwhile chapter, "Obama's Loyal Opposition," names the people in high and low places who urged Obama to effect a financial reform, and told him when and how, but he--alas--ignored them. Again, the most interesting chapters to me are those that contrast Obama with Roosevelt and Truman. In the chapter "Political Malpractice," Kuttner says the following on Roosevelt: "Virtually all of Roosevelt's major reforms were enacted over the strenuous

opposition of both Wall Street and Republicans in Congress. But it didn't matter, because the reforms served the people and the goal of a broad recovery. Roosevelt did not aspire to consensus at all costs but to help people, and that proved to be astute politics" (222). Obama, by contrast, recoiled from the Republicans' opposition and abdicated his

leadership. At the Republican retreat, Obama declared: "I'm not an ideologue. I am not." In response to this statement, Kuttner quips: "But then, why bother? Ideology is not some arbitrary penchant for clinging to stale ideas. It is a principled set of beliefs about how the economy and society work, and should work" (236). This is an important insight about Obama. If he doesn't have any convictions he is willing to fight for, why did he run for president? This contrasts nicely (and depressingly) with Truman, who criss-crossed America by rail for weeks, explaining to the people what he believed in: "' Some things are worth fighting for [Truman said]. Our primary concern is for the little fellow. We think the big boys have always done very well, taking care of themselves...It is the business of government to see that the little fellow gets a square deal...'" (248-9). By saying that, Truman nailed down the difference between democracy and plutocracy, which we seem to be living in now.

Kuttner ends his book by calling on the progressives to organize, for he doesn't see much hope elsewhere. I hear his call and believe in it.

Shelly Spilka