You are sitting at your desk in the world’s most famous workplace. Day after day, you are feeling like your supremely skilled experts somehow just managed to paint you into yet another corner in your unique Oval Office.
Calamities that were not just unthinkable but quite preventable have been happening to you since the first days of your presidency. First came a shameful disaster that should have been easily avoided — America’s calamitous withdrawal from the Afghanistan War. It had been anticipated ever since it was announced during the Trump years, yet it was never properly planned. Most recently, we’ve seen shattering failures of two banks that simply weren’t supposed to be allowed to fail: California’s Silicon Valley Bank and New York’s Signature Bank. Yet, your superstar U.S. Cabinet officials were caught off guard. Or even worse.
So no wonder you are sitting in your grand Oval Office and sympathizing with another old guy from your era — baseball’s Casey Stengel, whose workplace was just a dugout. After years of winning many World Series managing the Yankees, Stengel was managing New York’s brand-new Mets, who kept inventing new ways to lose. And so, New York’s legendary manager was famously said to have told New York’s legendary columnist Jimmy Breslin: “Can’t anybody here play this game?”
(Breslin made that great quote the title of his book on that godawful Mets team. But I always wondered if that quote was, maybe, too great. So one night at dinner in New York, I asked my pal: “Did Casey really say that?” Breslin smiled, paused, finally answered: “With a little help.”)
Fast-forward to the Biden presidency. Failures by the famous names around Biden have caused him grief — from Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, a highly acclaimed former four-start general, to Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell and his Fed predecessor, current Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen. They all missed warning signs that could easily have been seen.
The pathetically inept U.S. withdrawal from the long Afghanistan War has become a case study of a disaster that should never have been allowed to happen. Indeed, Defense Secretary Austin acknowledged that neither he nor the other top-tier policymakers had planned for a worst-case scenario: Austin testified to Congress that the planners “failed to grasp” how quickly the Afghan army would simply “melt away,” allowing the Taliban to regain control of the country.
But that explanation is inexcusably shortsighted. (And I say that as one who had thought he was a superb choice to run the Pentagon.) The U.S. withdrawal plan had one basic need — to assure the U.S. could get its personnel and all Afghans who worked for Americans from Kabul to the airport. Austin’s team assumed the Afghan army would safeguard the corridor. But news accounts in recent years had been replete with examples of where Afghan platoons had just walked off their jobs and gone home because corruption had caused them to go without monthly pay and even meals.
The military’s failure to plan for what happened was unconscionable. Austin must shoulder that blame. Also, Biden’s White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan, a longtime Biden aide but not an independent policymaker, failed to assure that sharper assessments were made.
The whole world was watching as that Afghan failure happened. And world markets were watching, big-time, as domestic banking regulators showcased their blatant inattention. Silicon Valley Bank fell first, then New York’s Signature Bank. They lacked diversity and news accounts everywhere made that instantly clear. They failed to safeguard their assets. The reason banking reporters everywhere knew that was because regulators everywhere knew it. And as the Fed was raising interest rates — and had long signaled it would in advance — there just was no excuse for the regulators to have failed to regulate.
But the regulators and the famous names who oversee them all failed to do what they all knew they needed to do. They needed to enforce the protections enacted in the Dodd-Frank banking reforms. But those Dodd-Frank protection limits were eased, big-time, during Donald Trump’s presidency.
Specifically, as the limits were vastly raised, Signature Bank was no longer under strict federal regulation oversight. That change was encouraged by bank lobbyists and a Signature Bank board member — the liberal former Rep. Barney Frank, the co-author of that famous banking reform act after the Great Recession. He made an estimated $2 million since he joined Signature’s board in 2015. On Sunday, the regulators closed the doors (revolving and otherwise) of Frank’s failed bank. It was the third-largest bank failure in U.S. history.
“I need to make some money,” Frank explained the other day. And that’s the difference between Frank and those inept Mets who drove Casey Stengel bonkers, and those inert experts who keep getting Joe Biden cornered in his corner-less office.
Barney Frank could always play the game.
