Noam Scheiber: ‘What My Book Got Wrong About Obama, Summers, Geithner, Recovery’

Source:Amazon- left-wing columnist Noam Scheiber's 2012 book about President Barack H. Obama.

“The widely acclaimed and newsbreaking account of President Obama’s campaign to rescue America from its recession: inside the meeting rooms, the inboxes, and the minds of the pedigreed propeller heads who guided America through a worldwide crisis.

DEEP INTO THE OBAMA PRESIDENCY, THE UNEMPLOYMENT RATE WAS PAINFULLY HIGH, THE GAP BETWEEN RICH AND POOR HAD WIDENED, AND THE STIMULUS HAD NOT DONE ENOUGH TO BRING JOBS BACK.

WHAT WENT WRONG?

FACING THE WORST ECONOMY SINCE THE 1930S, President Obama hired a crack team of escape artists: financial wizards who had pulled off numerous whiteknuckle getaways during the Clinton era. But this time, they fell far short. The Escape Artists reveals why.

Star White House journalist Noam Scheiber delivers a gripping narrative of the Obama presidency and the mistakes and missed opportunities that kept his pedigreed team from steering the economy in the right direction. With previously undisclosed internal documents and extensive, original reporting from the highest levels of the administration, Scheiber reveals how the very qualities that made these men and women escape artists in the 1990s ultimately failed them.

The Escape Artists” is a compelling narrative, deeply reported and beautifully written.” –Jonathan Chait, “New York”

“”The Escape Artists” offers great insight into Obama’s self-perception. . . . Scheiber’s reporting has naturally sparked a great deal of second-guessing in Democratic circles, and his book will provide plenty of ammunition for the president’s liberal critics . . . [and] to those critics on the right who believed that the White House never really earned their trust.” –Reihan Salam, “The Daily”

“The Escape Artists” reads like a Bob Woodward book–albeit better written and informed by a more sophisticated understanding of economics and policymaking.” –Daniel Gross, Yahoo! Finance

“A Woodwardian account of infighting in the White House’s economics team . . . Scheiber is a smart, clear-eyed reporter who frames his arguments elegantly.” –“Bloomberg Businessweek”

“Diligently reported and informative.” –John Cassidy, “The New Yorker”

“Noam Scheiber offers a persuasive take on administration policymaking . . . [and] provides a template for future administrations–even a future Obama administration–to avoid the trap of thinking too narrowly and too politically in a crisis.” –Matthew Yglesias, “Slate”

“Scheiber writes with ease and authority about complicated financial matters . . . and proves particularly adept at showing how [the Obama economic team’s] personalities, philosophies and previous experiences with one another shaped their interactions and the policy-making process.” –Michiko Kakutani, “The New York Times”

“What Scheiber offers is a judicious, nuanced and ultimately . . . persuasive chronicle of how contentious experts jockeyed to influence a young president stuck with an almost impossible set of chal-lenges. . . . Such sophisticated analysis of how the nation’s most powerful officials think–however one regards the wisdom of that thinking–distinguishes Scheiber’s book.” –Paul M. Barrett, “The New York Times Book Review”

About the Author

Noam Scheiber is a senior editor at The New Republic, writing about politics and Obama administration economic policy. He has written for the New York Times, The Washington Post, New York magazine, and Slate and has appeared on CNN, CNBC, MSNBC, and NPR. He lives in Washington, D.C.” 

From Amazon 

There’s always been this feeling on the Far-Left in America (mostly Democratic Socialists) that Barack Obama is not even a Democrat, at least not ideologically, let alone a Progressive or Progressive Democrat. MIT Professor Noam Chomsky has called Barack Obama a moderate Republican (if you can believe that) whose is the same ideological mode as a Richard Nixon or Nelson Rockefeller.

Noam Scheiber, even though he might be moderating now, is in that same left-wing, partisan camp, as the Noam Chomsky’s of the world and a lot of the writers at the New The New Republic, which is now just another version of the socialist The Nation Magazine, as well as a lot of the commentators over at MSNBC, or Democracy Now, and other left-wing media organizations in America, that have a real following with American leftists.

The 2009 stimulus debate, to deal with the Great Recession that took over and almost destroyed the American economy in 2008, is the perfect example of how the Far-Left, including left-wing Democrats like Noam Scheiber, feel about President Obama.

In early 2009, people who perhaps are even to the left of Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders (the only self-described Socialist in the U.S. Congress) saw this debate as the perfect time and opportunity for the Obama Administration to completely rework and remake the American economy.

American Socialists in 2009 believed that what America needed was an economic revolution and remake the American economy like Europe, replace the American capitalist system with a European social democratic system, where a lot less was expected of Americans to produce for themselves, because now the Federal Government would have a lot more responsibility and power to look after everyone’s well-being for them.

If you think about it, the 2009 stimulus debate and what Socialists were saying about President Obama and his administration, is not that different from what President Franklin Roosevelt and the flack and advice that FDR was getting from American Socialists and Communists in the 1930s during the Great Depression, that produced the New Deal.

Another thing that the Roosevelt debate has in common with the Obama debate of 2009, is that neither President was trying to end American capitalism or liberal democracy. They certainly weren’t trying to replace our economic system or form of government with anything. They were simply trying to save American capitalism and liberal democracy.

In both debates and both eras (the 1930s and 2009) you had people on the Right saying that the Federal Government shouldn’t do anything, because these things happen in a capitalist system and that the government should stay out and the let the economy fix itself. With the Far-Left calling for economic and political revolutions to remake the American economy and our form of government. With FDR and now President Obama basically saying (to use an old Bill Clinton line) there’s nothing wrong with America that can’t be fixed with what’s right with America.

The main reason why the Far-Left in America has never liked Barack Obama, at least since he’s been President, because he never became the Socialist that they thought they were getting when they three all their political support behind him in 2007-08, instead of supporting Dennis Kucinich or some other Far-Left Democrat. That’s why they don’t like him and see him as traitor, Uncle Tom (to put in in racial terms) a corporatist, etc, not as a good Democrat that they can love and support. 

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