Insider Baseball

While President Obama plays to the crowd, appearing on Leno and offering a tour of the White House for 60 Minutes viewers, the economic rhetoric of his administration seems increasingly pitched toward the financial elite. Per Matt Yglesias:

They want to maintain and restore confidence. But we’re now looking at a bifurcation of attitudes. Wall Street and other big business insiders take a different view of what sort of steps inspire confidence than do most people. To most people…the Wall Street whiz kids are, themselves, jokes and what would restore confidence is some kind of sense that they’ve had their asses kicked and some new people are brought in the run the show. But to the insiders, it’s just the reverse—they want themselves and their pals to continue to control the commanding heights of the economy.

In a New Republic article called “The Geithner Disaster,” John B. Judis sums up the case against the Treasury Secretary. Echoing Yglesias, he notes that “in almost everything that Geithner has done, he has roused this populism by appearing to be a patron of Wall Street.” Judis stops short of calling for Geithner’s resignation, but his critique is withering nonetheless.

Over at The Nation website, editor Katrina Vanden Heuvel proposes a last-ditch, not-so-family-friendly idea for getting the administration back on the populist track: appoint Eliot Spitzer as Treasury Secretary.