The philosopher William James took as a motto for practical morality: "By their fruits shall ye know them, not by their roots."
Suppose we test the last two and a half years by the same sensible criterion. Translated into the language of presidential power -- the power of a president whose method was to field a "team of rivals" and "lead from behind" -- the motto must mean: by their appointments shall ye know them.
Let us examine Obama, then, by the standard of his cabinet members, advisers, and favored influences, and group them by the answers to two questions: Whom has he wanted to stay on longest, in order to profit from their solidity and bask in their influence? Which of them has he discarded fastest or been most eager to shed his association with? Think of them as the saved and the sacked. Obama's taste in associates at these extremes may tell us something about the moral and political personality in the middle.
The Saved
Advisers whom the president entrusted with power beyond expectation, and sought to keep in his administration for as long as he could prevail on them to stay:
1. Lawrence Summers: Obama's chief economic adviser, 2009-2010. As Bill Clinton's secretary of the treasury, 1999-2001, Summers arranged the repeal of the New Deal-era Glass-Steagall Act, which had separated the commercial banks -- holders of the savings of ordinary people -- from the speculative action of the brokerage houses and money firms. The aim of Glass-Steagall was to protect citizens and the economy from a financial bubble and collapse. Demolition of that wall between savings and finance was a large cause of the 2008 meltdown. In the late 1990s, Summers had also pressed for the deregulation of complex derivatives -- a dream fully realized under Bush. In the first years of the Obama era, with the ear of the president, he commandeered the bank bailouts and advised against major programs for job creation. He won, and we are living with the results.
In 2009-2010, the critical accessory to Summers's power was Timothy Geithner, Obama's treasury secretary. Most likely, Geithner was picked for his position by the combined recommendations of Summers and Bush's Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson. The latter once described Geithner as "a very unusually talented young man," and worked with him closely in 2008 when he was still president of the New York Fed. At that time, he concurred with Paulson on the wisdom of bailing out the insurance giant AIG and not rescuing Lehman Brothers. Obama for his part initiated several phone consultations with Paulson during the 2008 campaign -- often holding his plane on the tarmac to talk and listen. This chain is unbroken. Any tremors in the president's closed world caused by Summers's early departure from the administration have undoubtedly been offset by Geithner's recent reassurance that he will stay at the Treasury beyond 2011.
Postscript: In 2011, Summers has become more reformist than Obama. On The Charlie Rose Show on July 13th, he criticized the president's dilatoriness in mounting a program to create jobs. Thus he urged the partial abandonment of his own policy, which Obama continues to defend.
2. Robert Gates: A member of the permanent establishment in Washington, Gates raised to the third power the distinction of massive continuity: First as CIA director under George H.W. Bush, second as secretary of defense under George W. Bush, and third as Obama's secretary of defense. He remained for 28 months and departed against the wishes of the president. Gates sided with General David Petraeus and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen in 2009 to promote a massive (called "moderate") escalation of the Afghan War; yet he did so without rancor or posturing -- a style Obama trusted and in the company of which he did not mind losing. In the Bush years, Gates was certainly a moderate in relation to the extravagant war aims of Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and their neoconservative circle. He worked to strengthen U.S. militarism through an ethic of bureaucratic normalization.
His approach has been endorsed and will be continued -- though probably with less canniness -- by his successor Leon Panetta. Without a career in security to fortify his confidence, Panetta is really a member of a different species: the adaptable choice for "running things" -- without regard to the nature of the thing or the competence required. Best known as the chief of staff who reduced to a semblance of order the confusion of the Clinton White House, he is associated in the public mind with no set of views or policies.
3. Rahm Emanuel: As Obama's White House chief of staff, Emanuel performed much of the hands-on work of legislative bargaining that President Obama himself preferred not to engage in. (Vice President Joe Biden also regularly took on this role.) He thereby incurred a cheerless gratitude, but he is a man willing to be disliked. Obama seems to have held Emanuel's ability in awe; and such was his power that nothing but the chance of becoming mayor of Chicago would have plucked him from the White House. Emanuel is credited, rightly or not, with the Democratic congressional victory of 2006, and one fact about that success, which was never hidden, has been too quickly forgotten. Rahm Emanuel took pains to weed out anti-war candidates.
Obama would have known this, and admired the man who carried it off. Whether Emanuel pursued a similar strategy in the 2010 midterm elections has never been seriously discussed. The fact that the category "anti-war Democrat" hardly exists in 2011 is, however, an achievement jointly creditable to Emanuel and the president.
4. Cass Sunstein: Widely thought to be the president's most powerful legal adviser. Sunstein defended and may have advised Obama on his breach of his 2008 promise (as senator) to filibuster any new law that awarded amnesty to the telecoms that illegally spied on Americans. This was Obama's first major reversal in the 2008 presidential campaign: he had previously defended the integrity of the Foreign Surveillance Intelligence Act against the secret encroachment of the National Security Agency (NSA).
At that moment, Obama changed from an accuser to a conditional apologist for the surveillance of Americans: the secret policy advocated by Dick Cheney, approved by President Bush, executed by NSA Director Michael Hayden, and supplied with a rationale by Cheney's legal counsel David Addington. In his awkward public defense of the switch, Obama suggested that scrutiny of telecom records and their uses by the inspectors general in the relevant agencies and departments should be enough to restore the rule of law.
When it comes to national security policy, Sunstein is a particularly strong example of Bush-Obama continuity. Though sometimes identified as a liberal, from early on he defended the expansion of the national security state under Cheney's Office of the Vice President, and he praised the firm restraint with which the Ashcroft Justice Department shouldered its responsibilities. "By historical standards," he wrote in the fall of 2004, "the Bush administration has acted with considerable restraint and with commendable respect for political liberty. It has not attempted to restrict speech or the democratic process in any way. The much-reviled and poorly understood Patriot Act, at least as administered, has done little to restrict civil liberty as it stood before its enactment." This seems to have become Obama's view.
Charity toward the framers of the Patriot Act has, in the Obama administration, been accompanied by a consistent refusal to initiate or support legal action against the "torture lawyers." Sunstein described the Bush Justice Department memos by John Yoo and Jay Bybee, which defended the use of the water torture and other extreme methods, in words that stopped short of legal condemnation: "It's egregiously bad. It's very low level, it's very weak, embarrassingly weak, just short of reckless." Bad lawyering: a professional fault but not an actionable offense.
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