Succoring Wall Street

Stuff happens. This week, for example, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner offered a plan to rescue failing banks, after which the president held a revealing news conference. Those events nudged me to reappraise Barack Obama.

First, I had to get my mind around insanity — the spectacle centered on the latest Geithner scheme for succoring Wall Street.

Wall Street is shorthand, of course, for the big banks, brokerages, bond houses, ratings agencies, hedge funds, specialized legal and accounting firms and much of the financial press.

Pundits galore waited nervously to see if those whose malfeasance led to this crisis would approve Geithner’s prescription!

Soon we’ll ask muggers if six months in the slammer is convenient.

While it’s not certain Geithner’s plan will work, there’s no doubt taxpayers will pay for it. Thus, we privatize profits and socialize risk.

Naturally, Wall Street cheered and blessed its lifeline; the Dow did a Baryshnikov, leaping 500 points rapturously.

Understand — the Obama administration, loath to test corporate America’s superior muscle, threw in the towel. And the nation exhaled.

With that psychotic episode as background, the president scheduled an evening Q&A of great moment — he initiated a slow pivot from facing the present crisis to promoting promised change.

Mr. Obama talked budget, plumping for his priorities — energy, health and education — while vowing to cut the deficit, too. Doing so meant navigating past reporters’ focus on “populist outrage” at AIG bonuses.

Again, Obama resisted the political temptation to join the mob chasing AIG with pitchforks and torches.

“I’m as angry as anybody about those bonuses,” he said calmly, but “the rest of us can’t afford to demonize every investor or entrepreneur who seeks to make a profit.”

Pressed on why he didn’t show “outrage” immediately, the president was curt. “Well, it took us a couple of days because I like to know what I’m talking about before I speak.” Next question.

It was déjà vu all over again. As in the presidential campaign, Obama rarely retorted to provocation but reiterated his proposals, dryly, professorially, seemingly confident citizens would understand and be persuaded.

I thought, “How naïve.” But hey, he won in November.

And, dense as I am, I grasped this: Barack Obama wants passionately to be (as he described Ronald Reagan) a “transformative” president.

He possesses an over-arching, complex vision of change dictating his strategy and tactics.

And his goals are to build rational, sustainable systems in health, energy and education while mitigating the unfairness of the tax system and updating regulation. Tall order.

Though he ran and won on that agenda, persuading citizens to spend huge sums now for rewards down the pike will be tough. Persuading them that health, energy and education are inseparable from the economy will also be difficult, as will breaching barricades erected by the present owners of health, energy and education.

Still, as his appointment of numerous Wall Streeters signaled and Geithner’s remedies confirm, President Obama is no radical. Far from warring on corporate America, he’s co-opting it to pull us back from the precipice.

Long-term, in fact, he’ll seek corporate help to rebalance the American seesaw, raising the democracy side, lowering the money side, all to restore a power equilibrium predating Reagan.

I’ll wager my life savings he’ll lose that battle. (Relax, it’s a tiny bet. Now.)

Obama, who’s pragmatic, conservative in traditional terms and an establishment liberal in today’s parlance, pursues a “just left of center” agenda.

It’s too centrist for me, but given the intellectual discipline and degree of difficulty involved in realizing it, I can only honor the author.

Quite a guy, Obama, I thought as I put the TV to bed.