Nate Silver has a wise article about yesterday’s Geithner appearance in Congress.
Take a look at Nate Silver’s article at FiveThirtyEight.com on the new Secretary of the Treasury and his terrible presentation to Congress yesterday. So many of the really far left sites are attacking the Treasury Secretary for not having a fully thought out plan, and the Right-wing sites are literally dropping the a-bomb on both him and Obama.
Here’s the beginning of Silver’s reasoning on why we should give both Obama and Geithner a little breathing room:
Nobody, absolutely nobody, has more incentive to get this right than the Obama Administration. If the economy collapses — well, more than it already has collapsed — then the Democrats get slaughtered in 2010, Obama is a one-termer, health care doesn’t happen, the poverty rate increases by a couple orders of magnitude, and the imperative to fix the environment gets put on the backburner. To suggest that Obama or Geithner are tools of Wall Street and are looking out for something other than the country’s best interest is freaking asinine. Maybe their ideas are wrong — but their hearts are in the right place.
… and three more points follow.
For me, I’ll give them some more time. Untangling the mess that the banks and Bush left us with is going to take much, much more planning and positioning.
Let’s see what happens the next time Geithner is in front of a serious committee.