the last book I ever read (Confidence Men, a book that presages Occupy Wall Street, sampled in five parts): sample three

from Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington, and the Education of a President by Ron Suskind:

Presidents are among the few mortals who are sometimes graced with chances to change a culture. Throughout a windswept March, the country had been working to dislodge some of the era’s prevailing certainties about markets being efficient, about people—economically, at least—getting what they deserve, along with the concomitant belief that financial barons are brilliant and indispensable, and manufacturing executives are dinosaurs.

With the eyes of the country on him, Barack Obama ended the month by shielding Wall Street executives against these winds of cultural change, while he fired a man who had effectively managed four hundred thousand workers in their making of seven million cars a year—without ever bothering to meet him. At the same time, he agreed to try to bail out Chrysler, and eventually GM, by adopting practices and principles of private equity in the use of government funds.

Improbable combinations, blended solutions, the integrating of opposites.

This was the Obama method, in his life and in his work. But he hadn’t gotten elected simply to search for this clever version of the middle ground. He’d been elected at a time of peril to change the country’s course.

By that measure, it would be easy to conclude that he missed some opportunities to show that America hadn’t necessarily gone from a country that makes things to one that makes things up, and that facing the consequences for one’s actions, at the heart of both a working democracy and effective capitalism, knows no boundaries. When the bankers arrived in the State Dining Room, sitting under a portrait of a glowering Lincoln, Obama had them scared and ready to do almost anything he said.

An hour later, they were upbeat, ready to fly home and commence business as usual.