Geithner: Is he up to the job?

“Never before has a political appointee with so much promise and potential fallen so far so fast,” said Nicolle Wallace in Politico.com. When Barack Obama named finance industry wunderkind Timothy Geithner as treasury secretary, Wall Street cheered, and both Democrats and Republicans said he’d gotten the right man. But after just a couple of months, Geithner is fighting for his political life, amid growing doubts he has the communications skills, personal charisma, or out-of-the-box thinking needed to take control of the broken financial system. Several weeks ago, Geithner’s first bank rescue plan was so vague that it sent stocks plummeting. More recently, he seemed clueless and defensive about AIG’s $165 million in bonuses, though his own department approved them. When he’s before the TV cameras or Congress, said Mike Madden in Salon.com, Geithner speaks robotically and haltingly, looking for all the world as if he can’t wait to escape the spotlight. That’s obviously why no TV cameras were allowed when the embattled treasury secretary unveiled a new, detailed version of his toxic-debt bailout this week. The tactic seemed to work, with Wall Street responding with a one-day stock surge of 7 percent. “Maybe the secret to fixing the economy is as simple as this: Don’t let Tim Geithner appear on TV.”

It won’t be as simple as that, said John Judis in The New Republic. Last week, congressional vultures and pundits began circling, and Obama had to insist publicly that he wanted Geithner to stay in his job. Geithner’s problem, though, is not primarily a question of competence; it’s that at a moment of rising populist rage, he has come across as “a patron of Wall Street.” As president of the New York Fed, he scrapped key regulatory measures. His own chief of staff, Mark Patterson, is a former Goldman Sachs lobbyist. Geithner is “habitually sympathetic to the people at the top of the financial system,” said Arianna Huffington in Huffingtonpost.com—in other words, the same people who got us into this mess.

Which is why Obama had better be very careful, said Frank Rich in The New York Times. If Geithner’s rescue plans are too slow to work, the still-popular president may become entangled in the public’s disgust over the “grotesque” greed of the Wall Street grandees. This, in other words, could be Obama’s “Katrina moment,” destroying his considerable political capital. Both Geithner and Obama have the same myopia, said Michael Goodwin in the New York Daily News. They think that “Washington is the antidote” for all that ails us. They may soon discover that “our institutions and culture are too big, too diverse, and too unruly to be run like a banana republic.”

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After just 60 days, it’s a bit premature to pronounce this administration a failure, said Doyle McManus in the Los Angeles Times. Geithner may lack charisma, but no one doubts his intellect, or his work ethic; he arrives at his desk at 6:30 each morning, and goes home at 9:30 p.m. Wall Street seems to like the details of his bank rescue plan, and once the furor over the AIG bonuses fades away, Geithner will have a chance “to redeem himself.” Let’s not forget what he has on his plate—the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, said Andrew Sullivan in the London Times. So give Geithner, as well as Obama, some time. Then in a year or two, if we’re still stuck in a recession, “give him hell.”