Web Letters: Obama's Toxic Advisers

I supported President Obama because he was going to change Washington. However, it seems that Washington is going to change him. When you get elected with such high expectations, anything short of a high is despair or a catastrophe. This is unfair to the president, who has to settle down to the reality and politics he faces. Oh, for a benign dictatorship.

Who is pure and untainted by Washington as usual? Daschle is a prime example of a public servant who cashed in, yet he may have been an excellent choice for implementing Obama's healthcare reform initiatives because of his inside Washington contacts and skills.

Will the perfect play executioner to the good?

Geithner, Summers and Rubin are part of the problem and can't or won't distance themselves from the Wall Street they learned to love even when it betrayed the country. They are afraid that the creative financial juices won't flow if the federal government regulates every transaction, so they are seeking to fix Wall Street without killing or angering the patient lest they be sued for malpractice or give the Republicans an issue to run on.

Obama has said that too much of job growth or GNP growth has centered on financial capitalism. As we have witnessed, this growth was highly leveraged and speculative and illusory. The stock market went up, but employment growth was anemic.Obama's education initiatives, I would bet, are not aimed at producing more hedge fund managers.

There is a real opportunity for reform, yet it seems that the president is doing all the heavy lifting to implement the campaign promises that got him elected. Yet in Washington, which is a conservative culture (they like the system which brings them the goodies and would like to conserve that system), Obama may be going against the grain--a contrarian in his own administration. I fear at times that he will be idealogically abandoned by his own staff--surrounded by satisfiers rather than optimizers who are dedicated to true reform of a broken and corrupt system.

So you are right about Geithner and company. Now what would you have the president do? Fire Geithner? Hire Krugman?

Larry Grossman

Longboat Key , FL

My considered opinion is that by entrusting our economic policy to Obama, we created a whole new class of toxic political "asset."

John D. Froelich

Upper Darby , PA

I love President Obama, but his commitment to Wall Street and its best casino types is not only confusing, it is terribly frightening. His illusion that the economy is an ocean liner, not a speed boat, is appropriate, but if he is the captain, he needs to order the helmsman to turn the friggin' wheel. Lawrence Summers and Tim Geithner are frozen in fear. I'm with my new hero Byron Dorgan: bring back Glass-Steagall 1933. I don't give a damn who it embarrasses. Even old pay go has admitted that it was a mistake. Gluttony isn't self-regulating.

James L. Pinette

Caribou, ME

Now, Mr. Scheer we can't have any of that 'sense of despair' crap--we must be happy while our national wealth is plundered for the benefit of a few plutocrats.

Oh yes, do we have any details on Mr. Larry Summers's "transparent" White House briefing for 100 financial industry executives (previously written about by Josh Gerstein of Politico)?

John Scott

Cave Creek, AZ