With a few high-profile appointments, he could pledge a fresh start and claim to empower a new “crisis team,” “emergency coalition,” or even a national unity government. Replacing Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, one of the least popular members of the current administration, with a Republican with broad support and an honorable private-sector background might instantly reassure corporate leaders and the public that the administration would give up its business-bashing ways to concentrate on the spending cuts and revenue enhancements needed to avoid catastrophe.
Imagine the electrifying impact were Obama to welcome a savvy, well-respected conservative like Steve Forbes into his cabinet, and to offer daily meetings with GOP leaders to craft the compromises necessary to resolve the latest budget crisis with long-term reforms. Another plausible addition to the administration would be retired New Hampshire senator Judd Gregg, a prior Obama choice for commerce secretary who turned down that post because of doubts about the president’s huge and clumsily designed stimulus package. Taking Gregg into the cabinet now would signal to the world that the administration had finally given up the notion that the United States government can spend and borrow its way to prosperity…
The cynical assumption suggests that Obama and his top advisers have reached the gloomy conclusion that nothing they can do or say would rescue the faltering global economy or promote meaningful job creation before he faces the voters in November 2012. With little chance of buoying his prospects with financial recovery, the president concentrates on branding Republicans as fanatical and destructive, suggesting that they want to deny women pap smears and breast exams or seek a poisonous increase of air and water pollution in order to blame them for the onrushing disaster that now appears inevitable.
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