JOE BIDEN; COMEDIAN

Vice President Biden at Gridiron, on Easter and the President (whispering): 'He thinks it’s about him'
By: MIKE ALLEN on March 22, 2009 @ 8:13 AM
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Good Sunday morning. JOHN PODESTA runs the ROME MARATHON today.

PAUL KRUGMAN BLOGS ON THE TOXIC-ASSET PROGRAM to be announced early this week: “The Geithner plan has now been leaked in detail. It’s exactly the plan that was widely analyzed — and found wanting — a couple of weeks ago. The zombie ideas have won. The Obama administration is now completely wedded to the idea that there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with the financial system — that what we’re facing is the equivalent of a run on an essentially sound bank. … And if we get investors to understand that toxic waste is really, truly worth much more than anyone is willing to pay for it, all our problems will be solved. To this end the plan proposes to create funds in which private investors put in a small amount of their own money, and in return get large, non-recourse loans from the taxpayer, with which to buy bad … assets. This is supposed to lead to fair prices because the funds will engage in competitive bidding.

“But it’s immediately obvious, if you think about it, that these funds will have skewed incentives. In effect, Treasury will be creating — deliberately! — the functional equivalent of Texas S&Ls in the 1980s: financial operations with very little capital but lots of government-guaranteed liabilities. For the private investors, this is an open invitation to play heads I win, tails the taxpayers lose. So sure, these investors will be ready to pay high prices for toxic waste. After all, the stuff might be worth something; and if it isn’t, that’s someone else’s problem. Or to put it another way, Treasury has decided that what we have is nothing but a confidence problem, which it proposes to cure by creating massive moral hazard. This plan will produce big gains for banks that didn’t actually need any help; it will, however, do little to reassure the public about banks that are seriously undercapitalized. And I fear that when the plan fails, as it almost surely will, the administration will have shot its bolt: it won’t be able to come back to Congress for a plan that might actually work. What an awful mess.”

VICE PRESIDENT BIDEN KILLS AT GRIDIRON: “Axelrod really wanted me to do this on teleprompter -- but I told him I’m much better when I wing it. … I know these evenings run long, so I’m going to be brief. Talk about the audacity of hope. … President Obama does send his greetings, though. He can’t be here tonight -- because he’s busy getting ready for Easter. (Whisper) He thinks it’s about him. …

“I know that no president has missed his first Gridiron since Grover Cleveland. Of course, President Cleveland really did have better things to do on a Saturday night. When he was in the White House -- he was married to a 21 year old woman. … I understand these are dark days for the newspaper business, but I hate it when people say that newspapers are obsolete. That’s totally untrue. I know from firsthand experience. I recently got a puppy, and you can’t housebreak a puppy on the Internet.

“Now let’s see: we have a Republican speaker who was born in Austria, and tonight’s Democratic speaker was born in Canada. Folks, this is Lou Dobbs’ worst nightmare. … We are now two months into the Obama-Biden administration and the President and I have become extremely close. To give you an idea of how close we are, he told me that next year -- maybe, just maybe -- he’s going to give me his blackberry email address. … But the Obama Administration really is a good team. I am the experienced veteran. Rahm can be an enforcer. And Tim Geithner is always there when you need to borrow money. And no questions asked.

“You know, I never realized just how much power Dick Cheney had until my first day on the job. I walked into my office, and you know how the outgoing president always leaves the incoming president a note in his desk? I opened my drawer and Dick Cheney had left me Barack Obama’s birth certificate. … I now realize that we have to be extra careful when we annunciate new policy ideas to make sure they don’t look like they’re personally motivated. For example, the other day there were a whole bunch of stories about the President’s hair going gray; the next day there’s a story about a Vice President who’s trying to grow new hair, and then the day after that, the two of us come out in favor of stem cell research. That looked bad.

“I’d like to address some of the things I said: Like when I said that ‘JOBS’ is a three-letter word. I did say that. But I didn’t mean it literally. It’s like how, right now, most people think AIG is a four-letter word. … Or when I announced our stimulus package website, I was asked how you get to it: All I said was I didn’t know the website number. What I really meant to say was, ‘Ted Stevens didn’t tell me what tube the website is in.’”

CBS PREVIEWS TONIGHT’S “60 MINUTES” INTERVIEW WITH THE PRESIDENT – 7 p.m. ET: “In his longest interview since taking office, President Barack Obama tells Steve Kroft that New York’s Wall Street executives need to get out of town to appreciate the public’s anger towards them and that embattled Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner’s job is safe. The president even joked that were Geithner to tender his resignation, he would say, ‘Sorry Buddy, you’ve still got the job.’ The 90-minute interview [Friday] evening began on the White House lawn and ended in the Oval Office where the president also addressed the economy, the bonus tax, healthcare, automakers’ bailouts, Afghanistan and Pakistan and answered recent criticism from former Vice President Dick Cheney. … The president said neither he nor Geithner has mentioned resignation from his Treasury post and that criticism is natural. ‘It’s going to take a little bit more time than we would like to make sure that we get this plan just right. Of course, then we'd still be subject to criticism,’ he tells Kroft. ‘What's taken so long? You've been in office a whole 40 days and you haven't solved the greatest financial crisis since the Great Depression,’ Obama said with a laugh.

“The president acknowledged his need for the support of Wall Street for his banking plan that he will reveal next week. But many of those executives, particularly in New York, need to appreciate populist perspective, too, he said in a discussion of the 90 percent bonus tax for workers making over $250,000 a year at companies receiving large taxpayer bailouts. Responding to Kroft’s observation that Wall Street types in the New York area thought the appointments of Geithner and Lawrence Summers to his cabinet indicated he would be more supportive of them, Obama said those people need to get out of town. ‘They need to spend a little time outside of New York. Because…if you go to North Dakota, or you go to Iowa, or you go to Arkansas, where folks would be thrilled to be making $75,000 a year-- without a bonus -- then I think they'd get a sense of why people are frustrated.’

“Obama fires back at former Vice President Dick Cheney’s charge that his plan to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay and end torture of terrorism suspects has made the U.S. less safe. ‘How many terrorists have actually been brought to justice under the philosophy that is being promoted by Vice President Cheney? It hasn't made us safer. What it has been is a great advertisement for anti-American sentiment.’ Pressed by Kroft that some of the released prisoners have returned to terrorist groups, the president said, ‘There is no doubt that we have not done a particularly effective job in sorting through who are truly dangerous individuals…to make sure [they] are not a threat to us,’ he says. But he called the Bush administration’s policy on detainees at Guantanamo –including long incarcerations with no trials – ‘unsustainable.’

“The interview includes a walk on the grounds of the White House, where the swing set for his two daughters, Sasha and Malia, is visible. Obama said having dinner with his family and playing with his children each day is a welcome respite from the pressure of his office where, he concedes, decisions that land on his desk are often a choice ‘between bad and worse.’ His hardest one thus far, he tells Kroft, was sending an additional 17,000 troops to Afghanistan.”

SPOTTED: 20 friends, dining last night to celebrate the birthday of Obama speechwriter and Lincoln aficionado Adam Frankel. Frankel, a co-author of Ted Sorensen's memoir "Counselor." was feted by the majority of the Obama speechwriting office as well as campaign stalwarts like Ben LaBolt, Katie Johnson (KJ) and Carlos Monje. The birthday boy capped the night with his very own Honest Abe Birthday cake (I'm not kidding). The dinner was at Chef Geoff's uptown spot, and the guests raved about the food.

SUNDAY SPEED READ:

--FRANK RICH, “Has a ‘Katrina Moment’ Arrived?”: “A CHARMING visit with Jay Leno won’t fix it. A 90 percent tax on bankers’ bonuses won’t fix it. Firing Timothy Geithner won’t fix it. Unless and until Barack Obama addresses the full depth of Americans’ anger with his full arsenal of policy smarts and political gifts, his presidency and, worse, our economy will be paralyzed. It would be foolish to dismiss as hyperbole the stark warning delivered by Paulette Altmaier of Cupertino, Calif., in a letter to the editor published by The Times last week: ‘President Obama may not realize it yet, but his Katrina moment has arrived.’ Six weeks ago I wrote in this space that the country’s surge of populist rage could devour the president’s best-laid plans, including the essential Act II of the bank rescue, if he didn’t get in front of it. The occasion then was the Tom Daschle firestorm. The White House seemed utterly blindsided by the public’s revulsion at the moneyed insiders’ culture illuminated by Daschle’s post-Senate career. Yet last week’s events suggest that the administration learned nothing from that brush with disaster. Otherwise it never would have used Lawrence Summers, the chief economic adviser, as a messenger just as the A.I.G. rage was reaching a full boil last weekend. … Bob Schieffer of CBS asked Summers the simple question that has haunted the American public since the bailouts began last fall: ‘Do you know, Dr. Summers, what the banks have done with all of this money that has been funneled to them through these bailouts?’ What followed was a monologue of evasion that, translated into English, amounted to: Not really, but you little folk needn’t worry about it. Yet even as Summers spoke, A.I.G. was belatedly confirming what he would not. It has, in essence, been laundering its $170 billion in taxpayers’ money by paying off its reckless partners in gambling and greed, from Goldman Sachs and Citigroup on Wall Street to Société Générale and Deutsche Bank abroad. …

“Within 24 hours, Summers’s stand was discarded by Obama, who tardily (and impotently) vowed to ‘pursue every single legal avenue’ to block the bonuses. The question is not just why the White House was the last to learn about bonuses that Democratic congressmen had sought hearings about back in December, but why it was so slow to realize that the public’s anger couldn’t be sated by Summers’s legalese or by constant reiteration of the word outrage. By the time Obama acted, even the G.O.P. leader Mitch McConnell was ahead of him in full (if hypocritical) fulmination. … To get ahead of the anger, Obama must do what he has repeatedly promised but not always done: make everything about his economic policies transparent and hold every player accountable. His administration must start actually answering the questions that officials like Geithner and Summers routinely duck. … To fall short would be to deliver us into the catastrophic hands of a Republican opposition whose only known economic program is to reject job-creating stimulus spending and root for Obama and, by extension, the country to fail.”Dana Houle is a political professional now living in Washington, DC. He is the first in his family to graduate high school, to travel overseas without a rifle in his hand, and to work in politics, but he has maintained his family's devotion to organized labor as a force for positive political and social change. He became a contributing editor in 2003, before Daily Kos ran on the Scoop system and thus before user ID's, diaries and meta. In 2005 he teamed with other contributing editors Meteor Blades and Trapper John to found The Next Hurrah. He misses Tiger Stadium and rues the demise of the independent record store. At 42, he is technically a Baby Boomer, but he refuses to join any age cohort that would have him as a member.