Tim Geithner’s anti-populist “blood lust”: How his stubbornness cost America

[xchrom]

http://www.salon.com/2014/05/12/tim_geithners_anti_populist_blood_lust_how_his_stubborness_cost_america/



Sometimes Democrats can be as bad as Beltway pundits in depicting genuine disagreements about policy and ideology as merely craven political posturing. I am reminded of that once again by the various buzzy excerpts of and commentary about former Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner’s new book “Stress Test: Reflections on Financial Crises,” which is out today.

Geithner quotes President Bill Clinton giving him advice about how to deal with the “populist” impulse to punish Wall Street malefactors: “You could take Lloyd Blankfein into a dark alley and slit his throat, and it would satisfy them for about two days. Then the blood lust would rise again.” He tells us that Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s TARP oversight committee hearings “often felt more like made-for-YouTube inquisitions than serious inquiries.”

He casts White House adviser Dan Pfeiffer, who opposed the administration’s ill-timed “pivot” toward deficit reduction and “Grand Bargain” hunting in 2011, as merely pandering to the Democratic base. Campaign strategist David Plouffe, meanwhile, is depicted as reflecting the conscience of the president when he reminds the team, “We didn’t run on a platform of permanently increasing the size of government.” Maybe more damaging, Geithner accuses Pfeiffer of asking him to lie on a Sunday show and say Social Security didn’t contribute to the deficit, again to placate the Democratic base. “It wasn’t a main driver of our future deficits,” he writes, “but it did contribute.” That misleading argument has been a staple of Wall Street Democrats’ efforts to cut Social Security.

On one level Clinton’s quote shouldn’t be surprising: His soft spot for Wall Street is well known, and Clintonian “Third Way” Democrats love to caricature the populist left as being motivated by hatred and “blood lust.” But it’s clear Clinton’s advice helped Geithner justify his own unwillingness to take seriously the genuine policy differences motivating the criticism of his progressive adversaries.

[SamKnause]

1. One of the many despicable choices made by

President Obama.

[marmar]

2. k/r