Shots in the Dark

The next Secretary of the Treasury will not be Larry Summers, but Timothy F. Geither, president of the Federal Reserve bank of New York.

…people close to Mr. Obama said he clicked with Mr. Geithner during a recent private meeting; the men are the same age and Mr. Obama is closer temperamentally to the low-key and almost boyish Mr. Geithner than to the more tightly wound Mr. Summers. Mr. Summers, who will be 54 on Nov. 30, is widely described by the same word — “brilliant” — but is also renowned for being arrogant, abrupt and at times difficult to work with as a result.

The stock market rose nearly 500 points on the news, which was neither a slight to Summers nor a compliment to Geithner, but a symbol that any action by the new administration, at this point, is a welcome one.

And Summers is hardly irrelevant.

Mr. Summers is likely to be named as an economics adviser as well, two sources familiar with the Obama transition said, with the expectation that eventually he will be named to the Federal Reserve Board, perhaps as successor to Chairman Ben Bernanke.

This is a smart move by Obama. Choosing Summers this close to the Harvard debacle would have meant a fight, and a pointless one. This way he gets Summers as an adviser and a Treasury secretary who seems well-respected and won’t provoke a confirmation battle.

Plus, with the news that Hillary Clinton seems likely to be secretary of state, had Obama chosen Summers his administration would have started to take on a quality of Clinton III, to which one can only say, bleh.

As is, there’ll be plenty of Clintonites advising Obama on economic matters.

[Bob] Rubin protégés in fact are likely to dominate the Obama economic team, to the certain dismay of some Democratic Party liberals and union leaders who disparage the Rubin faction’s devotion to the goals of balanced budgets and free trade. In addition to Mr. Geithner and Mr. Summers, Mr. Obama will name as his budget director Peter R. Orszag, a Clinton administration economist and Rubin ally who is now head of the Congressional Budget Office.

It’s not fair to tar incomers with the Rubin brush, but it is time to reassess Rubin’s reputation, not only in light of his half-hearted service to Harvard (or was it service to Larry Summers?) but also because of the $150 million or so Citigroup (where’s the stock at, $3.50?) paid him over the last eight years. (Was Bob Rubin’s annual compensation, on average, higher than Dick Fuld’s?)

Mr. Rubin has been oddly quiet in recent months, though given his stature and gravitas he would have been a natural person to speak to the crisis of greed and excess on Wall Street. Except—whoops—he’s part of it.

And Sarah Palin provides it! Watch as she gives a TV interview following a symbolic pardon of a Thanksgiving turkey…without seeming to realize that a workman is slaughtering turkeys right behind her, shoving them into some kind of chute which beheads them or something. (My knowledge of turkey slaughter is limited.)

Honestly, you can’t make this stuff up.

Such a shame that 02138 went out of business; as David Brooks (implicitly) points out in his column today, the magazine would have a lot to write about: Barack Obama is putting together an Ivy League administration.

This truly will be an administration that looks like America, or at least that slice of America that got double 800s on their SATs. Even more than past administrations, this will be a valedictocracy — rule by those who graduate first in their high school classes. If a foreign enemy attacks the United States during the Harvard-Yale game any time over the next four years, we’re screwed.

One thinks that Brooks is going to go somewhere interesting (and skeptical) with this. But then he turns around and says, homogeneity notwithstanding, it’s a pretty impressive group.

….I’m trying not to join in the vast, heaving O-phoria now sweeping the coastal haut-bourgeoisie. But the personnel decisions have been superb.

I agree, for the most part. My concern is that there are too many Clintonites. I like Rahm, but I can’t quite get my head around Hillary as secretary of state. I like her seriousness; I just don’t like her, and I’d like to see the Clinton era recede into memory. Unlike Eric Holder, I find it hard to pardon…Eric Holder, for the Marc Rich affair, which was truly shameful. Tom Daschle has his heart in the right place, but I wish that he and his wife weren’t lobbyists.

Still, you will never find anyone entirely pure in Washington, and if you do, it may not be a good thing; a little corruption helps get things done. And what I do like about this group is that Obama is clearly not afraid to surround himself with people of substance who will challenge him. This may not be a team of rivals, but neither is it a circle of sycophants. The current situation calls for a serious administration, and these are serious people.

It does, of course, remind me of how badly the Bushies have dropped the ball in this regard, what a dysfunctional administration theirs has been.

During the Clinton administration, I could name every Cabinet secretary and major department head. They were active and visible.

Now? Who’s the secretary of labor? EPA head? HHS secretary? Secretary of the Interior?

(Actually, I do know that one, and he’s a friggin’ disaster.)

The only people who would hold these jobs under the Bush administration are non-entities. Because the real answer to all of the above is “Dick Cheney.”

And the result has been a near-total vacuum of constructive domestic policymaking, which is surely one of the reasons people so dislike Bush and Cheney now. What have they actually done to improve the lives of Americans?

I’m convinced that John McCain would have had a much stronger possibility of becoming president if the Bush administration had actually had a domestic policy other than destroying the environment and forcing kids to take standardized tests….

In the wake of winning 20 games for the first time in an 18-year career, Yankee pitcher Mike Mussina has announced his retirement.

He is the first pitcher since Sandy Koufax to retire after a 20-victory season.

Kind of elegant….

My father’s second cousin, the writer Peter Matthiessen, has won the National Book Award for his book Shadow Country, a retooling of several previously published Matthiessen novels.

I mention the family tie as a way to ease into a story—a couple of stories, really—of which Mr. Matthiessen’s award reminds me.

Back in late 2004, when I changed my surname from my father’s, Blow, to my mother’s, Bradley, my father was angry with me not only for changing my name, but for not choosing a name, such as Matthiessen, from his side of the family.

I tried to explain to him that, in my decades-long consideration of name and identity, I had considered doing exactly that. “Richard Matthiessen” sounded pretty good to me.

But ultimately, of course, I decided otherwise. My reasons were simple. Matthiessen denoted an ethnicity that is not mine. Moreover, since I was coming off a book that didn’t exactly receive heaps of critical praise, I expected that some people would see that name as a crass attempt to rebrand myself in a more highfalutin’ literary fashion.

(Similarly, though I would have happily done so, I could not have taken my middle name, Preston, due to the existence of the very talented writer…Richard Preston.)

And since the decision to change my name was so long and difficult and had entirely nothing to do with American Son, such a reaction would have irritated me no end. (Some people wrote that about “Bradley,” anyway, which made me laugh.)

Now comes the second story. (It is, um, related. I promise.)

Last night I received an e-mail from a community college student in New York state asking if I would cooperate with a biographical project. I’m somewhat flummoxed by the content of this e-mail, and wanted to share it to see what other folks’ reactions might be.

Here ’tis, with only some identifying specifics deleted:

Hello Mr. Blow or should I say Mr Bradley. Funny story about your name is that I chose your book, American Son, out of a cart-full to do a biography. My college professor reminded me several times that I wasn’t doing the bio on John F. Kennedy, Jr. but rather on Richard Blow. Little does she know, your name is actually Richard Bradley now. How rude of me, I haven’t even introduced myself. My name is xxxxxxx and I’m a second year student and xxxxx Community College, in Central New York. If it’s not too much trouble I was wondering if you could answer a few questions about yourself to help me out on the bio I’m doing of you.

Thank you for your time,

(Name deleted)

Here is the first thing I must say: If I ever get too big for my britches, I hope someone will remind me of the line,

I chose your book…out of a cart-full ….

Second thing: Contrary to what my correspondent suggests—what did you do…?— my career in journalism isn’t quite over.

And third: How exactly does one respond to such a request?

I’ve been hearing so much sloppy thinking about Barack Obama’s cabinet choices following the mode of Lincoln’s “team of rivals,” a concept branded by pop historian Doris Kearns Goodwin in her book of the same name, that it makes me want to draw a pentagram on the ground, place the book inside it, douse it with kerosene and flick a match, in an attempt to exorcise the “team of rivals” cliche from public discourse in favor of some original thinking.

I’m grateful that CUNY historian James Oakes has relieved me of this responsibility and done something more constructive: penned a NYT op-ed debunking the team of rivals narrative.

But there’s more mythology than history in the idea that Lincoln showed exceptional political skill in offering cabinet positions to the men he had beaten in the race for the 1860 Republican nomination. …For one thing, there was nothing new in what Lincoln did. By tradition, presidents-elect reserved a cabinet position, often secretary of state, for the leading rival in their party.

Nor is it quite correct to say that Lincoln installed his “enemies” in the cabinet. Rivals for his own party’s nomination are not the same thing as political “enemies.” It would have been inconceivable, for example, for Lincoln to offer a cabinet appointment to his Democratic opponent, Stephen Douglas…

An elegant and smart piece of writing.

He has returned to where he did not wish to return. Back to walking the spotted white marble corridors of the Russell Senate Office Building. Back to Room 241, which says “Senator John McCain — Arizona” on the door, and where a trickle of people stroll in on this morning in hopes of getting his pre-autographed photo and to inquire about obtaining tickets for Barack Obama‘s inauguration. Others stare. He has perfected his own middle-distance stare and the curt nod of someone coping.

—Michael Leahy, “For McCain, a Subdued Return to Capitol Hill,” in today’s Washington Post.

In Slate, financial writer Dan Gross looks at the performance of the Harvard Endowment (now officially capitalized from here on) and finds that it’s, well, not so good. (Thanks to the reader who alerted me of this.)

…every quarter, [Harvard Management Company] files a 13-F form with the Securities and Exchange Commission, indicating a portion of its holdings in publicly traded securities—stocks, bonds, exchange-traded funds. The 13-F is a snapshot and is not fully representative of Harvard’s overall holdings. But the chunk of the portfolio revealed in the most recent 13-F looks like it was chosen by someone who watched a few episodes of CNBC’s Squawk Box and heard that the hot new investments were emerging markets, commodities, and private equity.

[Blogger: Forgive me, Dan Gross, for the extensive quoting.]

The 13-F shows Harvard with some 231 positions worth nearly $2.9 billion, highly concentrated in popped macroeconomic bubble plays. The top 10 holdings, which Bloomberg helpfully breaks out, account for 70 percent of the value of the disclosed holdings. Virtually all of them performed rather poorly in the third quarter, and virtually all of them have slid in the weeks since Sept. 30.

The biggest position disclosed—all amounts and dollar values are as of Sept. 30—was $463 million in the iShares MSCI Emerging Market fund. As the six-month chart shows, that fund’s off nearly 60 percent from this summer and down by about one-third from the end of September. Third-largest was a $233 million position in Weyerhauser, the wood-products giant that has fallen about 40 percent since the end of September. The top 10 included $232 million in the iShares MSCI Brazil Index Fund, off about 40 percent since the end of September; about $51 million in the iPATH MSCI India Index, off about one-third since the end of September; and $158 million in the iShares FTSE/Xinhua China Index, off about 30 percent since the end of September….

The bottom line: Harvard’s attraction to emerging market investments suggests that the university’s money managers bought into the idea of “decoupling,” the theory that an economic crash in some markets (the US, say) wouldn’t necessarily mean a crash in other markets, such as emerging markets.

That said, Gross qualifies his argument by saying that HMC asset-allocation data puts Harvard’s investments in emerging market stocks at a mere 11% of the portfolio, which is certainly in line with what most financial advisers would recommend to an individual investor. [Because—and this is the point—those markets are generally considered riskier than domestic or other foreign stocks, and so shouldn’t make up a very large percentage of anyone’s portfolio.]

So perhaps Harvard was not so reckless after all….

Look like Joe Lieberman is going to keep his committee chair…..

Andrew Sullivan’s still on the case: He links to this fascinating blog entry considering the details of Trig Palin’s birth…and finding them improbable.

And I have to say…it does sound pretty improbable!

If [Sarah] Palin’s story is completely true, if she is Trig’s mother, and everything happened the way she has claimed, she took utterly unacceptable medical risks with her infant’s life. She did not have him checked when her membranes ruptured, to rule out the possibility of cord prolapse. She would have had to be dressed and to comport herself in a way that would have increased the chances of infection for almost 24 hours. She risked having to give birth with no medical assistance in the aisle of an airplane. She risked disrupting the travel plans of hundreds of other people. And, if Palin’s story is completely true, Cathy Baldwin-Johnson should lose her medical license.

If you read the blog, well…it sounds like a big if.