Hey, Barack: Get Tough Like Michelle

Prez, Geithner must quit 'coddling' Wall Street: Dowd
By Matt Cantor,  Newser Staff
Posted Mar 22, 2009 11:04 AM CDT
Hey, Barack: Get Tough Like Michelle
Michelle Obama takes part in the groundbreaking of the White House Kitchen Garden on the South Lawn, Friday, March 20,2009, with students from Washington's Bancroft Elementary School.   (AP Photo/Ron Edmonds)

Michelle Obama said her husband would be pulling garden weeds whether he “liked it or not”—and the president could take a page from her book, writes Maureen Dowd in the New York Times. Obama and the Treasury secretary “have been coddling the Wall Street elite,” and the banking bigwigs are taking advantage, heedlessly throwing money around like nothing’s changed.

Obama is worried that if he toughens up, “the spoiled Sherman McCoys will run away, the rescue plan will fail and the markets will wither.” Meanwhile, Citigroup’s CEO spent $10 million on his office, Fannie Mae’s handing execs million-dollar bonuses, and AIG passed billions to “high-flying insurees.” “It’s a time in America’s history where we need less smooth jazz and more martial brass,” Dowd writes.
(More Wall Street stories.)

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