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With a fast and furious start, the President's team is launching trillion-dollar programs to rescue the economy and remake the face of America. But will they get it right? Fortune went behind the scenes where his advisors are waging war on the recession.
作者：Nina Easton
On a day in early February when incoming White House officials under previous administrations would have just been learning how to use their office phones, the Obama economic team is already racing against the clock.
As Christina Romer rushes back from an urgent meeting on the economic stimulus package, she passes by a Scotch-taped paper next to her door denoting her new title as chair of the Council of Economic Advisors. The President's much-vaunted Economic Recovery Advisory Board - outside experts led by Paul Volcker - isn't yet in place, even though Obama's plan almost is. From a bare-walled office in the Old Executive Office Building, Austan Goolsbee is busy calling the 16 CEOs, labor leaders, and economists who have been chosen for it.
Over in the West Wing, Jason Furman dials up members of Congress from a paper-strewn desk crammed outside the small office he will eventually have to share with fellow National Economic Council deputy Diana Farrell. Their boss, Lawrence Summers, insists I meet him downstairs in the ornate Roosevelt Room rather than in his work-in-progress corner office upstairs. Both men are swamped, fielding queries from Capitol Hill on President Obama's ambitious economic plan.
At this White House there's no time to settle in. Even as their wall art sat in bubble wrap, Obama's economic team was pushing through Congress the most expensive emergency spending package in the nation's history. And they were helping Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner craft his own sweeping plan to rescue the nation's banking and housing sectors, phase two of a $700 billion effort launched by his predecessor, Hank Paulson.
That's just the start. The team is fast at work on health-care reform, energy independence, vast changes in banking regulations, and the possibility of a "grand bargain" to curb entitlement costs that envisions historic sacrifices on both sides of the aisle: Republicans supporting tax increases and Democrats conceding to benefits cuts. "This is not a small-ball President," says Summers, Obama's top economic advisor and chair of the National Economic Council. "He wants to take on the large issues."
There is a breadth and breathlessness to these under-takings, a frenzy of policymaking that will shape the contours of America's economic future. Top Obama advisors who talked (often as they walked) with Fortune in early February put a premium on speed - speed to catch the right moment to turn around a deepening recession, speed to take advantage of this moment of crisis to put in place a Democratic vision of government's role, speed to pass major legislation while the President is riding high in the polls. Obama's White House has been endlessly compared to Lincoln's team of rivals, or J.F.K.'s best and brightest. But we might also toss in the image of Sandra Bullock trying to control a runaway busload of passengers before the bomb goes off. (That scene was of course from the movie - "Speed.")
If that means rolling over a growing chorus of critics and forsaking a more measured and thoughtful lawmaking process, Obama officials insist they have no choice. Romer's own academic research concludes that no post-World War II recession (nor the Great Depression) was solved by fiscal policy. While opponents say this proves that the spending-laden package that barreled through Congress is a nearly $800 billion experiment to overcome that history, Romer insists it's all about timing. The main reason fiscal policy didn't work in the past, she says, was government hesitation. "Normally that process didn't happen until the recession was practically over," says the former Berkeley economist. "What's so exciting and amazing is precisely that we're getting our act together in time to do some good."