Frank Rich's column this week, Has a ‘Katrina Moment’ Arrived?, is only a little hyperbolic in its thesis. In Rich's column, Tim Geithner and Laurence Summers play respectively the roles of Michael Brown and Michael Chertoff, and Summers comes in for particular attention:
The "dirty little secret," Obama told Leno on Thursday, is that "most of the stuff that got us into trouble was perfectly legal." An even dirtier secret is that a prime mover in keeping that stuff legal was Summers, who helped torpedo the regulation of derivatives while in the Clinton administration. His mentor Robert Rubin, no less, wrote in his 2003 memoir that Summers underestimated how the risk of derivatives might multiply "under extraordinary circumstances."
What to make of this, and what can President Obama do to avoid his economic Katrina, to avoid becoming another one-term economic failure like Jimmy Carter?