The Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama character assassinations...

[JDPriestly]

56. But they were not necessarily the best qualified, mist highly competent individuals, and what

is worse, they did not represent a wide enough spectrum of thought. Geithner is a rather rigid man from what I can tell. Bernanke seems to me to be a bit full of himself. And Larry Summers?

Have you read Elizabeth Warren's book? Several of the anecdotes she tells about the period in which she was supposed to be monitoring the use of the bail-out money are telling.

Maybe the most startling is the one in which she went out to eat with Larry Summers, and he gave her a lecture about how if she wanted to be on the inside, she should not criticize those already on the inside. What an effective way to control the information that President Obama would receive from those who were supposed to be auditing or reviewing and in that way assisting with the management of the bail-out.

When Obama was first elected, I heard that he was reading A Team of Rivals, which is about Lincoln's cabinet made up of men who did not agree on some points but whose varied points of view were helpful to Lincoln as he handled a difficult situation.

Obama did not have enough rivals advising him on his relationships with Wall Street.. The team he chose looked an awful lot like a team the big banks or Wall Street might have chosen.

In my opinion, Obama has been brilliant when it comes to foreign policy and domestic issues like healthcare. He also has tried very hard to hold the union together in the face of a terrible lack of cooperation and respect on the part of Republicans -- at times approaching a strike.

But his appointments to deal with the economic crisis and the banks included too many defenders of the banks and too few defenders of the people. And we will pay for that for a long time, I am sorry to say. But then maybe we will wise up and make sure our next president understands economics better and either appoints some people with different points of view or maybe even is a person with some good answers on how to balance the inerests of the banks and those of ordinary working people.