All the President’s Tricks

Building a team in the USA can hold surprises. In 2000, George W. Bush asked Dick Cheney to find him a vice president. Cheney thoroughly researched the candidates, intruding into their private lives, and then told Bush that after everything, he himself was the best candidate. He later used the data he had collected to put down any protests from the other candidates.

At any rate, the presence of Cheney (who guided the team in the stretch between the election and the actual transfer of power) has been important for a team that had to face 9/11 and other global problems.

As for Barack Obama, now that he’s been elected with Joe Biden, things seem different. However, the outside may have changed, but the inside is still full of the same tricks. Bush was shy, sometimes top secret; Obama is transparent – he uses the media and lets the media use him.

He deceived Hillary Clinton by revealing her as his choice for Secretary of State in public so that she would find it difficult to refuse. And he checked up on the Clintons, Bill and Hill, collecting data that he could use in the future.

After all, you can’t run from the fact that the president needs to know everything about the people he works with, and he has the authority to find out. But as with Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld and the others, Obama’s choices of Clinton and Bob Gates are promising picks.

Obama loves to talk and his rhetoric leans to the left, particularly the way the American élite thinks of it, but he also promises to act pragmatically at center. If we look at his new deal policies with strong state interventions, the impression is that the pragmatism even becomes excessive.

The team, with Tim Geithner from the Fed of New York in the Treasury and former Harvard president Lawrence Summers on the National Economic Council, is first-class, but also competes with Italian and European habits of potential conflicts of interest. Good intellectuals with great skills, I agree. But without coming from Goldman Sachs or having the endorsement of Robert Rubin (the prestigious ex-Clintonian now Counselor of Citigroup, that almost went bankrupt), doors are closed.

Paradoxically, thanks to Obama’s choices, the same people who, under Clinton, deregulated now-collapsed financial loans and helped the new president by attacking deregulation and reviving Roosevelt’s vision, will now save the economy with the taxpayers’ money. But after all, this is the law of the American system, which rewards institutional continuity, avoids radical fractures, and creates deregulation by finding a balance in all areas of public life.

Obama’s dream team is going to face another paradox: closing Guantanamo and opening a “special court,” the least legal among institutions, in order to not let jihadists return to duty at the expense of soldiers and civilians. Best wishes.