Since the Obama administration leaked details of its toxic asset plan on Friday night, the reaction in the blogosphere has been swift and harshly critical: the zombie plans have won, writes Paul Krugman; it’s a Rube Goldberg device for shifting losses to the Treasury, writes James K Galbraith; really bad ideas, writes Atrios.

There has, however, been one prominent exception: Brad Delong, who defends the Geithner plan in this FAQ posted Saturday. Josh Marshall and Hilzoy have since pointed to DeLong’s stance as evidence that the Treasury plan has not been universally panned by the reality-based community. Krugman saw fit to argue back. Meanwhile, the Obama administration is making a push to build blogger support for the new bank bailout, and DeLong is their highest-profile ally.

But DeLong has a credibility issue. Here at LittleSis, we have a sneaking suspicion that his views have been shaped by family ties: Brad’s brother Chris, a hedge fund manager linked closely to Robert Rubin, is poised to profit handsomely from the toxic asset plan.

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In earlier posts, we’ve highlighted Robert Rubin’s network of protégés, who have assumed nearly every economic policy post of consequence in the Obama White House. In spite of his abysmal record of institutional leadership – Citigroup entered penny stock territory on Friday and Harvard, where Rubin’s influence as a member of the Corporation is unrivaled, has all but run out of cash – Rubin’s “wise man” brand won over Obama, who moved most of the policy staff of the Rubin-founded Hamilton Project and top Rubin advisers from the Clinton era into key administration posts at Treasury, the OMB and the inner sanctum of the White House.

While Rubin’s role in re-shaping the Democratic Party has been chronicled (and discussed here), less attention has been paid to his adeptness in building a power base of hedge fund capitalists that parallels his political network. Many of the techniques that allowed Rubin to pack the White House with friends – such as deep mentorship of bright-eyed Ivy League recruits fresh out of school and subsequent placement of the recruits in strategic institutions – have served also to place Rubin at the center of an unrivaled web of capital.

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After spending the better part of five years running for office, a victorious John F Kennedy set out to realize the promises made in the course of his 1960 presidential campaign, which was built on the New Frontier theme. As William Domhoff recounts in The Powers That Be, while Kennedy was an expert campaigner, he lacked executive experience and was overwhelmed by the task of filling hundreds of appointments in the upper realms of the Federal bureaucracy. He thus turned to Robert Lovett, a financier who’d been an ally of his father. Domhoff writes:

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