Veteran journalist and Pulitzer Prize winner Ron Suskind’s new book,“Confidence Men,” is in many ways an incredible piece of work. That’s both a compliment and a criticism.
Suskind chronicles the first two years of the Obama presidency, from its grand promises — Barack Obama in the fall of 2008: “I am running for president of the United States because the dreams of the American people must not be endangered anymore” — to its grimmer realities. Although Suskind isn’t unsympathetic, he comes down hard on Obama and his administration. “Gaining the trust without earning it,” he charges, “is the age old work of confidence men,” and Suskind uses what he characterizes as the quarreling, dysfunctional group of larger-than-life personalities that Obama chose as his advisers to show how critical policies such as health care and financial services reform turned out to be less than transformative. “Stripped to the bone” is how he characterizes the final health-care bill.
“Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington, and the Education of a President” by Ron Suskind (Harper. 515 pp. $29.99)
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A new book by Ron Suskind alleges that women have had a tough time in the Obama White House.
This is wonkish stuff, but the you-are-there, personality-driven nature of Suskind’s writing is compelling. He quotes Obama as saying that he had “connected our current predicaments with the broader arc of American history” — and that’s precisely what Suskind himself tries to do here, with much success. He pairs the rise of debt in the United States with the flattening of middle-class incomes and the flow of great wealth to the top. He repeatedly invokes Franklin D. Roosevelt, quoting from his famous first inaugural speech about the bankers of his time: “Faced by failure of credit, they have proposed only the lending of more money. . . . They know only the rules of a generation of self-seekers. They have no vision, and when there is no vision the people perish.”
Of the Obama presidency, Suskind writes: “Presidents are among the few mortals who are sometimes graced with chances to change a culture. Throughout a windswept March, the country had been working to dislodge some of the era’s prevailing certainties about markets being efficient, about people — economically, at least — getting what they deserve,” but “with the eyes of the country on him, Barack Obama ended the month by shielding Wall Street executives against these winds of cultural change.”
Suskind says he spoke to more than 200 people, and the book is full of great anecdotes, insights and quotes. Ron Bloom, the banker turned United Steelworkers executive turned adviser, was in the room as the economists who surrounded Obama argued over what to do about the failing auto companies. Furious at what he heard, Bloom later said, “There wasn’t one guy in that room who’d spent any serious time having beers with real workers.” Suskind quotes former Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker telling a former engineering professor that “the trouble with the United States recently is we spent several decades not producing many civil engineers and producing a huge number of financial engineers. And the result is [expletive] bridges and a [expletive] financial system!”
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