“Take a walk with me,” he said to Carole Sonnenfeld Geithner, within earshot of others.
Their stroll on the South Lawn was Mr. Obama’s last step in a lengthy effort to keep her husband, Timothy F. Geithner, as secretary of the Treasury for the rest of the president’s term. Having worn down Mr. Geithner, Mr. Obama wanted to explain why it was important that her husband delay his return to New York.
That Mr. Obama went to such lengths to keep Mr. Geithner, after not having done the same with others on his economic team who had left at midterm, underscored how much he had come to rely on Mr. Geithner.
The question for outsiders as varied as Tea Party Republicans and liberal Democrats is why Mr. Obama would be so insistent that Mr. Geithner stay. As Treasury secretary, he was the highest-ranking member of a team that underestimated the depth of the downturn, and he has managed both to anger Wall Street firms and to be a target of criticism at Occupy Wall Street rallies.
For Mr. Obama, however, Mr. Geithner has emerged as the indispensable economic adviser who has outlasted every other member of the original inner circle and whose successes easily outweigh his missteps. The two are not friends exactly — Mr. Geithner rolls his eyes at the idea of playing golf, the president’s preferred form of relaxation — but they are what David Axelrod, Mr. Obama’s political adviser, calls “kindred spirits.”
Europe’s troubles, perhaps more than anything, highlight what Mr. Obama likes about Mr. Geithner, because they help show how the effects of the financial crisis could have been worse in this country.
After a rocky first few weeks in the job, Mr. Geithner managed to stabilize the country’s troubled banks by forcing them to own up to their problems and seek additional funds from both the government and the private sector. The Treasury has even earned a profit for taxpayers on the still-reviled bank bailout program.
European leaders — defying repeated advice from Mr. Geithner, by phone and in five trips so far this year — have taken a much less aggressive approach, applying one Band-Aid after another to address their mounting debts and ailing banks, only to discover they must do more.
“They’re moving ahead, but we just need them to move ahead more quickly and with more force behind it,” Mr. Geithner said of European leaders on Thursday, after meeting with Pacific region finance ministers in Honolulu.
Many outside analysts believe that if Europe had followed the Treasury’s lead sooner and forced banks to hold more capital, its financial institutions would not be so vulnerable.
The administration misjudged the length of the downturn, as did many private economists. Although Mr. Geithner wanted Congress to pass more short-term help for the economy than it did, he was not among those in the administration who were pushing hardest for additional short-term measures to lift hiring.
As a consequence, Mr. Obama’s economic team failed to help him prepare Americans for the pain ahead. It has proved a defining mistake of the Obama administration.
Although Congress limited the administration’s options, many economists fault Mr. Obama and Mr. Geithner for being too timid in intervening, especially to help homeowners. In White House meetings, Mr. Obama has repeatedly voiced frustrations — sometimes brandishing letters from distressed homeowners — that the administration’s initiatives have not helped nearly as many homeowners as advertised.
“I just don’t think they tried hard enough, and I’ve told the administration that,” said Alan S. Blinder, an economist at Princeton and former vice chairman of the Federal Reserve. “They haven’t done the really difficult things — like using a lot more public money. Yes, there are legal complexities, political difficulties and all that. But stemming this epidemic of foreclosures was — and still is — vitally important.”
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