South By North Strategies, Ltd.

From a profile of U.S. Treasury Sec. Timothy Geithner in the current issue of The Atlantic Monthly …

Geithner doesn’t breed nuance of opinion. You’re either for him or against him, and popular sentiment leans strongly toward the latter. But it’s possible to view him as someone who was indispensable in halting the crisis (his understanding of Wall Street’s psychology was particularly valuable) while still doubting whether someone so steeped in the institutional cultures of Washington and Wall Street has the necessary distance to direct their reform.
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The angry uprising that stopped the Obama agenda in its tracks is part of the steep political cost of following the Geithner Plan—a cost that seems to keep rising, even as the fiscal cost continues to fall. Even the most prominent indicator of recovery, the robust stock market, has come to seem a curse, by reinforcing in the public mind how quickly Wall Street has recovered while everyone else is left to endure. And Obama can’t really tout all that he’s done without also drawing attention to his gentle treatment of Wall Street.
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Depending on your point of view, this is either a cruel or a fitting irony. By placing his chips on Geithner a year ago, Obama was betting that a strategy of growth under any circumstances was the right move, and that devising new rules was best left to insiders.