A lot of people are talking about Frank Rich’s explosive new article in New York magazine. I think it is a remarkable thing, the latest and maybe the most comprehensive in an increasingly lengthy series of articles and investigations into the Obama administration’s failure to properly investigate the causes of the financial crisis.
By now this is not quite a mainstream media drumbeat, but it’s coming close: between the reporting of Louise Story and Gretchen Morgenson at the New York Times to the recent not-terribly-laudatory piece on New York Southern District U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara by the New Yorker’s George Packer, to Eliot Spitzer’s bitter commentary on the subject on CNN, to my own bleatings, and now this Rich broadside, it seems quite clear that the Obama administration’s failure to clean up Wall Street is becoming a matter of some fascination with the few investigative journalists who are not covering the Casey Anthony case.
Rich’s thesis is that this issue is becoming important not just to reporters, but to voters, and that Obama may soon pay for his failures at the polls:
Obama can win reelection without carrying 10021 or Greenwich in any case. The bigger political problem is that a far larger share of the American electorate views him as a tool of the very fat-cat elite that despises him.
In making this point, Rich uses language that seems unusually savage for him:
For all the lurid fantasies of the birthers, the dirty secret of Obama’s background is that the values of Harvard, not of Kenya or Indonesia or Bill Ayers, have most colored his governing style. He falls hard for the best and the brightest white guys.
Yikes! That last line is truly brutal and I imagine will not be forgotten inside the White House, which once must have viewed Rich as one of Obama’s great supporters in the punditry world. A lot of journalists, myself included, were once enthralled by Obama, and saw his election as a rare uplifting moment in our electoral history, with the candidate himself performing with tremendous grace and class as he helped slay the country’s racial demons. Some of us even thought that Obama might be that rare, once-in-a-generation-type political talent who could help the country rise above itself, an MLK or a Roosevelt.
Keep reading here: Frank Rich Blasts Obama For Letting Wall Street Off the Hook | Rolling Stone Politics | Taibblog | Matt Taibbi on Politics and the Economy.
