With the Geithner “wunderkind” and Summers “socratic genius” brands badly damaged, Obama faces pressure from a broad and growing spectrum to find new front men for his economic policy team. This was in evidence last week when Paul Volcker and Austan Goolsbee were trucked in from oblivion to champion Obama’s new bank reform agenda.
Volcker and Goolsbee, though they’re only marginally more progressive than Geithner and Summers, present a serious threat to the power network behind Obama’s “bankers bonanza” economic policies. Whereas Summers and Geithner owe their public lives to Robert Rubin–the man behind the curtain in Obama’s first year–Volcker and Goolsbee owe him relatively little, which is presumably why they were banished in the first place. Establishing Volcker and Goolsbee more prominently in the White House coterie would present the first major threat to the Rubin axis in the West Wing, which, in addition to Summers and Geithner, includes administration insiders Peter Orszag, Michael Froman and Jason Furman.
