Geithner’s scrupulous care not to promise too much, so as not to be seen as failing if the economic plan falls through, is not merely a reflection of “No Drama Obama.” It’s also a reflection of Geithner’s mind-set. “He’s been in bureaucracy all his life,” Seidman says, “and that’s the way they operate. You don’t get rewarded much for being right, but you take a hell of a beating if you’re wrong.” Still, one man’s bureaucrat is another man’s dedicated, lifelong servant of the commonweal, and that, presumably, is the Geithner who, one assumes, aced his interviews with President Obama.

The conventional wisdom when Obama selected Geithner for Treasury secretary was that even though he was firmly entrenched in the status quo, he was a good choice—“hardworking and smart,” as former comptroller of the currency Eugene Ludwig says. The euphoria was such that even a serious tax problem—Geithner’s never-satisfactorily-explained failure to pay self-employment taxes for four years—didn’t derail his nomination. So when he laid an egg as Obama’s economic point man, there was something approaching fury in the media and blogosphere. “It’s a tough job, so you’re going to take some heat,” Seidman says.

It would be wrong to blame all of ­Geithner’s problems on a lack of speechifying talent. The substance of his bailout plan would have drawn grief even if a man with the stature of Warren Buffett had presented it, and his handling of the AIG bonuses scandal showed a tin ear to public sentiment. After a spasm of populist outrage, President Obama instructed Geithner to do everything he legally could to stop the bonuses. Geithner, the policy wonk, simply may not have the raw political instincts that the job requires to keep a restive public happy.

Even so, his constituency of one, the president, is firmly behind him (at last look). Geithner has been seeking to reclaim the narrative by writing an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal and granting a few carefully stage-managed interviews—so stage-managed, in fact, that a public-relations aide openly scribbled out talking points to Geithner in front of a National Public Radio producer during an interview at his office.

No matter how well rehearsed, Geithner strains to exude the confidence that comes with knowledge and experience. It’s old news to people familiar with ­Geithner that he is not an economist and has no private-sector experience in finance, in contrast to pretty much every other Treasury secretary in recent years. For his critics, that says it all. “He may not be that comfortable with the subject matter,” Change author Cohan says. “I think that, in general, people who are good at math are more comfortable with talking about finance and thinking about financial policy and strategies. I think that if you’re going to come up with better strategies and better ideas, you need to have someone who’s a strategist, who understands how to come up with better policies.” Cohan says he’ll be “very surprised if Geithner comes up with any really new, insightful ideas on how to solve the financial problems.”

The question now—you might call it the $100 trillion question—is whether Geithner can shake off his bureaucratic past. He declined to be interviewed for this article, but a spokesperson emailed a statement saying that the Treasury secretary “has moved quickly and decisively. This crisis was years in the making, and it will take time to solve, but he is committed to doing whatever it takes to stabilize our financial system and repair our economy.”

To be fair, Geithner is in the hot seat, and most anyone in it would be toasted. “I don’t think the issue of leadership in a crisis can be reduced to a personality contest,” says Ludwig, now CEO of Promontory Interfinancial Network. Ludwig himself was at one time considered a candidate for the Treasury post. “We’re in too serious a situation to focus on the sideshow of personalities,” he says. He believes that it’s simply too soon to decide whether Geithner is doing a good job. “Let’s give him a chance,” he says.

Another person who tilts in that general direction is Michael Granoff, CEO of Pomona Capital, who is close to the Obama administration and was on the Treasury transition team during the Bush-Clinton handoff in 1992. “There are ways in which being Treasury secretary is like being president,” he says. “You get credit for good things that maybe you weren’t entirely responsible for, and you get blamed for bad things that you are also not necessarily responsible for. If you’re Treasury secretary and you’re the face of the economy, the same thing happens.”

Granoff argues that it’s not fair to blame Geithner for failing to respond unequivocally to an economic crisis that has no simple solution. “I think that people are in some ways projecting the fact that everybody’s uncomfortable—because nobody really knows the answer—onto an individual, which happens to be him,” he says. From this perspective, Geithner seems vague not because he’s adrift but because the crisis is so complex and murky. “The clarity that some people would like about what’s happening and about our answer to it is, in some ways, something that we just don’t have right now,” Granoff says.

Considering Geithner’s history of leaning on advisers and mentors, one can find a guide to his future actions not just in the John Thains and Gerald Corrigans he relied on at the New York Fed but also the people surrounding him in the Obama administration. Since Obama became president, the center of gravity at Treasury has shifted to policymakers from the Hamilton Project, a little-known think tank under the wing of the Brookings Institution that promotes growth-oriented economic policies. The group was founded in 2006 by its then director, Peter Orszag, who now heads the Office of Management and Budget. Other members of the group’s advisory board include Geithner’s old boss Robert Rubin, lately of Citigroup, and former deputy Treasury secretary Roger Altman, who presided at one of Geithner’s rare public appearances, a March 25 event at the Council on Foreign Relations. Alice Rivlin, founding director of the Congressional Budget Office, is also a member.

With such talent surrounding him, and with the administration beginning to fill all those vacant desks at Treasury, it’s more than remotely possible that ­Geithner will turn out to be more of a Truman than a Paulson Lite. But for that to happen, he’ll need fresh ideas and a wider circle of acquaintances—and old habits die hard. In early March, as the hellish tornado of criticism was touching down, Geithner was reportedly spotted having lunch at the Four Seasons restaurant in Manhattan with his mentor Pete Peterson. One can only imagine what the two men talked about, but the scene at the end of the 1972 movie The Candidate comes to mind. Having reached the pinnacle of government service, climbing about as high as one can without actually being elected by anybody, Tim Geithner may now be asking, “What do I do now?”