New and worth-reading piece in GQ by a former Bush speechwriter about his boss’s approach to the economic crisis:
Finally, the president directed us to try to put elements of his
proposal back into the text. He wanted to explain what he was seeking
and to defend it. He especially wanted Americans to know that his plan
would likely see a return on the taxpayers’ investment. Under his
proposal, he said, the federal government would buy troubled mortgages
on the cheap and then resell them at a higher price when the market for
them stabilized.“We’re buying low and selling high,” he kept saying.
The problem was that his proposal didn’t work like that. One of the
president’s staff members anxiously pulled a few of us aside. “The
president is misunderstanding this proposal,” he warned. “He has the
wrong idea in his head.” As it turned out, the plan wasn’t to buy low
and sell high. In some cases, in fact, Secretary Paulson wanted to pay
more than the securities were likely worth in order to put more money
into the markets as soon as possible. This was not how the president’s
proposal had been advertised to the public or the Congress. It wasn’t
that the president didn’t understand what his administration wanted to
do. It was that the treasury secretary didn’t seem to know, changed his
mind, had misled the president, or some combination of the three.
More here.
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