The portrait of the Obama White House that the veteran journalist Ron Suskind draws in his searing new book, “Confidence Men,” is that of a young, inexperienced president lacking the leadership and managerial skills to deal effectively with the cascading economic problems he inherited; a brainy but detached executive with a tendency to frame policy matters intellectually “like a journalist, or narrator, or skilled observer”; an oddly passive C.E.O. whose directive on restructuring the banks in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis was, the author says, ignored or slow-walked by his own economic team.
“Confidence Men,” Mr. Suskind says, was based on interviews with more than 200 people, including former and current members of the Obama administration, as well as the president himself.
Mr. Suskind quotes a former chairman of the National Economic Council under Mr. Obama, Lawrence H. Summers — who is himself characterized by colleagues in these pages as a bullying know-it-all who acted as a kind of gatekeeper to the Oval Office on things economic — as saying to the budget director, Peter Orszag: “We’re home alone. There’s no adult in charge. Clinton would never have made these mistakes.”
As for how women fared within the White House, Christina D. Romer, the former chairwoman of the Council of Economic Advisers, is quoted saying she “felt like a piece of meat” after being boxed out of a meeting by Mr. Summers. And the former communications director Anita Dunn is quoted saying the Obama White House “fit all of the classic legal requirements for a genuinely hostile workplace to women.”
Of course there are denials now about the quotes and the administration is fighting back. But they did agree to the interviews and the author did win the Pulitzer Prize.
