Book of the week: Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington, and the Education of a President by Ron Suskind

(Harper, $30)

He’s in over his head, said Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times. That’s the image of President Obama that Ron Suskind creates in his “searing” new best seller about the ineffective response by the young chief executive and his team to the staggering financial and economic crisis they inherited. Suskind, a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and former Wall Street Journal reporter, gathered insights from numerous White House insiders, including many who are now questioning the book’s reporting. But the story has an inescapable power, and Suskind indicts the president for numerous sins, from operating a boys club to going AWOL during crucial policy debates. At one point, Obama economic adviser Lawrence Summers is quoted as telling a colleague: “We’re home alone. There’s no adult in charge.” Ouch.

The presence of such “disloyal, conniving advisers” was a big part of Obama’s problem, said David A. Graham in The​Daily​Beast​.com. Suskind “makes a compelling case” that Obama had been able to win election because of the economic gurus who were advising him when the financial crisis hit. Because his campaign brain trust included Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz and former Fed Chair Paul Volcker, Obama “knew the crash was coming, and he was able to talk about it competently.” Yet when it came time to govern, Obama appointed an economic team anchored by Wall Street veterans Summers and Timothy Geithner. Suskind writes that Geithner was practically insubordinate in ignoring a request from the president to plan a possible government takeover of Citibank and other large banks. Obama is portrayed as being unable to manage his runaway staff. In the rare instance that he acts decisively, he’s ignored.

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It’s hardly surprising that “the White House has felt a need to push back against this narrative,” said Massimo Calabresi in Time. Several current and former staff members, including Geithner, have charged Suskind with factual errors. Yet “what’s obscured” by the press’s focus on Obama’s management style is the book’s larger message. Suskind’s intent, it seems, was to demonstrate how difficult it is for a president to achieve anything in a political system “packed full” with self-serving allies of big business—the title’s “confidence men.” Suskind’s Obama is a disappointment, but he’s also “just one player in a larger U.S. political system that has abandoned its values.”