Confidence Men - Notables

"Presidents are amoung the few mortals who are sometimes graced with chances to change a culture. Throughout a windswept march, the country had been working to dislodge some of the era's prevailing certainties about markets being efficient, about people--- economically, at least--- getting what they deserve, along with the concomitant belief that financial barons are brilliant and indispensable, and manufacturing executives are dinosaurs. With the eyes of the country on him, Barack Obama ended the the month by shielding Wall Street executives agains these winds of cultural change, while he fired a man who had effectively managed four hundred thousand workers in their making of seven million cars a year-- without bothering to meet him. At the same time, he agreed to try to bail out Chrysler, and eventually GM, by adopting the practices and principals of private equity in the use of government funds." p241 "Someone said to me the other day that history produces great leaders. But I don't think that's quite right. I think the American people produce great leaders. The fact that they took a guy who was four years out of the Illinois Senate and made him the president, but insist that he run every mile of the race to get there, clear every hurdle, run every gauntlet-- there's wisdom in that....but now, 5 months along he [Axelrod] and his boss were furiously trying to run up steep and unforgiving learning curves." p 283 "The confidence of a nation rests on trust and can endure for years after this trust has been broken. But it cannot endure indefinitelyif the foundation of trust is not at some point earned. Confidence is the immaterial residue of material actions: justly enforced laws, sound investments, solidly built structures, the well-considered decisions of experts and professionals. Confidence is the public face of competence. Separating the two -- gaining the trust without earning it -- is the age old work of confidence men." p292 "The president received the report on May 15. it took just a few days for Summers to hear about it. He found out through Emmanuel. Orszag looked up from his desk. Summers had stormed over from the White House to Orszag's office, and his face was red with rage. It looked like he was about to burst a blood vessel. He told Orszage he'd found out about the paper. He said that he, Peter, knew the rules, no matter what the president had said. Everything was supposed to go through NEC....[Summers] What you've done is IMMORAL!..." p 297 On Peter Orszag writing a summary report at Obama's direction to get it directly to him. "'What is my narrative?' he all but shouted. 'I don't have a narrative.' Of course he was right. The extraordinary story of Barack Obama -- a boy, so truly African American, who was blown between countries and households before finding his solid stance in the United States and then racing upward through its meritocracy-- no longer seemed pertinent to almost anything he was doing. It was, no doubt, always a narrative of 'up ahead, a dream of what would be': of how he would bind the country into an enlarged ideal of shared purpose, integrating its dissonant chords into a melody as elegant and surely struck as he, himself, appeared to be. Instead, he had vanished into a cloud of endless policy debates and irreconcilable factions, of bold words -- still hoping to summon the magic -- so often divorced from measurable deeds. Bit by bit, month by month the first narrative had faded, even if plenty of people felt it's presence, like the ghost of a lost limb. 'He was right' one of the participants that morning recalled. 'He had no narrative. No story. For someone like Obama, that's like saying I don't know who I am. That I've lost my way." p 372