Lonely Geithner

Shameful is the word:

"There is an area that I think is, I don't know, shameful is the word," Paul Volcker said this morning at a Joint Economic Committee hearing. "The Secretary of the Treasury is sitting there without a deputy, without any undersecretaries, without any, as far as I know, assistant secretaries responsible in substantive areas at a time of very severe crisis. He shouldn't be sitting there alone."

Vipal Monga is already hearing conspiracy theories:

Our source also took a sympathetic view toward Geithner, who is increasingly being portrayed as sitting alone in his office at Fifteen Street and Pennsylvania Avenue. "It's like he's being set up by Obama to fail," the source says, noting that the president's touting of Geithner's rescue plan did much to set up unrealistic expectations for the Treasury secretary's poorly received speech, which introduced his Financial Stability Plan on Feb. 10.

This is weird: there's no reason for Obama to throw Geithner under the bus at this early date, no matter how much power Larry Summers is wielding behind the scenes. (Remember, though, that when Vikram Pandit went to Washington last week, he looked to Summers for guidance on the Obama administration's view on Citigroup.) My suspicion is that it's more cock-up than conspiracy.

But this is the single most important department in the executive branch, and there's no room for cock-ups, especially not ones of this magnitude. Geithner was nominated in November, ferchrissakes, and it's going to be March before he's capable of getting any work done. That's just wrong, when the global financial system is falling apart around his ears.

Obama ran what was probably the most efficient presidential election campaign of all time, and there was great hope that that efficiency would carry through to the White House. So far, however, there's been precious little sight of it since November 4. Which is dispiriting, to say the least.