I saw a poll yesterday that said the three least popular people in American public life were Speaker Nancy Pelosi, House Republican Leader John Boehner, and Timothy Geithner, Treasury Secretary. Pelosi and Boehner don't really interest me but Geithner is of an entirely different order of being. He has been at the center of U.S. economic policy for most of his adult life and was a favorite of Bob Rubin and Larry Summers when all three were at Treasury in the Clinton years. And inconsequential people do not end up running the New York Fed, as Geithner did. The point I'm trying to make here is that Tim is showing signs of becoming the Bob McNamara of the Obama Administration. He seems to strike his superiors as the indispensable man whose brain power and energy mow down opponents just as Mac's calculator, cost-benefit analysis mind did in the '60's.
The Viet Nam War was the result of the best and brightest work of Bob McNamara and his genius colleagues and it haunted him the rest of his long life. Tim Geithner is about Mac's age when JFK chose him to run the Pentagon and I do hope that his old age will be serene and filled with the praise that follows wise and successful leadership. What he does now will determine the nature of his, and our, final years.
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