The New Republic

1 Complete Fox News CEO Roger Ailes’ explanation as to why he gave Sarah Palin a three-year contract as a commentator: "Because ______________________"a) I figured it was worth three million dollars to be sure we’d have the exclusive when she announced her decision about running for president in 2012.b) I listened to Bill Kristol.c) she was hot and got ratings. READ MORE >>

When Republicans recently announced plans to manipulate how states apportion their Electoral College votes, they were met with a public outcry: An unfair, sneaky exercise in goalpost-moving, critics said. Some architects of the proposed changes have since appeared to back off. READ MORE >>

Last week I wrote that the appellate decision striking down President Barack Obama’s January 2012 recess appointments to the National Labor Relations Board identified a real constitutional problem. READ MORE >>

Subterranean windowless “ballrooms” are the bane of contemporary political confabs, but the setting for the National Review Institute’s summit this past weekend, in the lower basement level of the Omni Shoreham in Washington, seemed fitting. After all, the rhetoric coming from Republicans has been increasingly bunkerish: President Barack Obama, the line goes, is not just out to destroy the American free enterprise system—that was the line for the first term. READ MORE >>

Barack Obama's pre-presidential manifesto, The Audacity of Hope, has only one extended riff on gun control—not a homily on behalf of the cause or even a meditation on the deep divisions opened by the debate, but a story of crummy luck. READ MORE >>

I was all set to go into a swivet about the federal appeals court's decision against President Obama's recess appointments for the National Labor Relations Board (and, by implication, his appointment of Richard Cordray to run the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau). Would it be all right with the D.C. Court of Appeals if we had a functioning government? Apparently not. READ MORE >>

What are we to make of Tim Geithner on his last day as Treasury Secretary? For my money, the story that best gets at his essential Geithner-ness took place in the second half of 2009, when the recently-bailed out banks were back to making staggering profits even though unemployment was 10 percent. The public was furious over this disparity, which naturally caught the attention of Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff. And so Emanuel gathered the president’s top political and economic advisers to figure out what to do about it. READ MORE >>

Many Democrats were irate at the news that Virginia Republicans are considering changing their state's election laws so that future Electoral College votes will be apportioned by congressional district, rather than on the basis of a winner-takes-all popular vote. READ MORE >>

 LA: Your predecessor Hank Paulson in his book describes how at the height of the crisis he would have sleepless nights, worrying that a giant financial collapse was going to occur on his watch and that he would go down in history as the Herbert Hoover of the current era. Your colleagues all say you are remarkably calm, even in the middle of a crisis.TG: Well I was very worried throughout that period of time. Starting in August of ’07 I had moments of deep, serious concern about the future. The hardest part for me was that period between when we knew we faced an existential threat of collapse but before we figured out what we were going to be able to do. Before we figured out the contours of our plan.LA: Was that from Lehman onwards?TG: I would say from the end of December of ’07, there was a great sense of foreboding, gathering storm, forces beyond our control. Even as early as back in August of ’07. But it dramatically worsened in the fall of ’08, of course.LA: When you took office in January, we had had TARP, we had had all of those guarantees in place, and yet they still didn’t seem to be working. There was still a run on Citi, still a run on Bank of America.TG: When I first met the President in October of ’08, when he was then a senator, a candidate running, I remember saying to him that the steps that Hank Paulson, Bernanke and I and others took earlier in the fall had broken the financial panic. But at that stage the economy was still eroding at an accelerating pace and the financial system was still completely frozen. So yes, it was getting worse. When the President took office, when I came in in January, at that point we were still at the edge of the abyss. And we now know in retrospect that the economy was shrinking at an annual rate of 9 percent and the global economy was in a state of near freefall too. It felt pretty bad.LA: The way you dealt with the financial crisis will go down as your signature achievement. It turned out to be remarkably successful economically. But you yourself have said that while you saved the economy, you lost the public. Was there any way of making politics of this work?TG: I think that’s a great question. I think it’s hard for any of us to know. My own view was that it was going to be very hard, if not impossible to design a financial rescue that was going to be effective in protecting all the innocent victims hit by the crisis and still satisfy the completely understandable public desire for justice and accountability. Those things were in direct and tragic tension, never resolvable at that time. I always felt that the only preoccupation for people in policy at the time should be to fix the problem as quickly as we could, as effectively as we could, and only after that would other things be possible, including how to figure out not just how to clean up the mess, but reform the financial system.LA: One of the ways that people have figured out in the past to reconcile the politics was to go populist. That was what Roosevelt did. You, on the other hand, had been resolutely against that. You refer to it as Old Testament justice, implying that while it may be emotionally satisfying, it doesn’t serve any purpose.TG: I never used that phrase as a pejorative description. I just used it as a simple shorthand to refer to the understandable need people had for justice. But the President didn’t ask me to come do this to be the architect of a political strategy. I never felt that was my thing. I had some views on the issue, but I didn’t give them much weight. I thought my job was to figure out the financial parts.LA: Was the talk about “fat cat bankers” counterproductive?TG: I’m biased but I felt that in the basic strategy that the President embraced and that we put into effect, we did something that was incredibly effective for the broad interest of the economy and the financial system. I feel the President’s rhetoric over that period of time was very moderate relative to the populist rage sweeping across the country. And I never quite understood why the financial community took such offense at what was such moderate rhetoric relative to what we have seen in other periods in history. READ MORE >>

As I predicted, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's calendar-freezing machinations to reform the filibuster turned out to be much ado about nothing. Reid and McConnell have struck a deal to eliminate filibusters on "motions to proceed," leaving intact filibusters on the actual legislation. In exchange, the minority will be guaranteed the chance to bring two amendments to the floor. READ MORE >>