A Crisis Wasted

Barack Obama's Defining Decisions

By: Reed Hundt

Narrated by: Jason Culp

Length: 12 hrs and 3 mins

Publisher's summary

This book is the compelling story of President Obama’s domestic policy decisions made between September 2008 and his inauguration on January 20, 2009.

Unlike all other presidents except Abraham Lincoln - who decided not to allow slavery to expand westward before he was sworn in - Barack Obama determined the fate of his presidency before he took office. The results of these fateful decisions led to Donald Trump, the worst person Obama could have imagined, taking his place eight years later.

This book describes how and why these decisions were made, and discusses whether the outcomes could have been different. Based on dozens of interviews with actors in the Obama transition, as well as the author’s personal observations, this book provides unique commentary on those defining decisions of winter 2008-2009.

A decade later, the ramifications of the Great Recession and the role of government in addressing the crisis are the reasons behind the ideological battle between progressivism and neoliberalism in the Democratic Party and the continuing struggle for direction in the Republican Party. As many seek the presidency in the November 2020 election, all candidates and of course the eventual winner will face decisions that may be as critical and difficult as those confronted by Barack Obama. This book aims to provide them guidance from history.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.

©2019 Reed Hundt (P)2019 Brilliance Publishing, Inc., all rights reserved.

it's alright

little ti sympathetic to Obama as a person. He was the president, he made the decisions.

This is a five star book; listen when you can concentrate

This book was invaluable for increasing my understanding of the Obama administration. The author is well-reasoned and compelling. I’m glad he wrote this book. I, too, never want such a crisis to be wasted. I want politicians to read this. Sometimes you just have to think bigger.

It might be better read this in book format, however. It’s sufficiently detailed to to be difficult to understand in one pass (at least for me). This was particularly true in the middle chapters on the development of the Obama stimulus package, less so in the beginning and end. I usually only listened to this when I could focus exclusively on it.

It’s not the narrator’s fault, btw. He sounds wise, reasonable, worldly and with just the right impression of dry wit. I though he was great choice for this. It’s just dense subject matter.

Compelling account of Obama’s 1st year

The premise of the book is that a bigger stimulus and more heroic effort to prevent foreclosures would have been economically and politically better than the approach taken by the Obama administration. Instead, the Obama administration prioritized getting Republican votes for the stimulus package, fiscal responsibility, and a quick pivot to healthcare reform.

The author includes quotes that give a fair reading to the opposing views. For example, solving the underwater mortgage crisis would have been expensive ($750 billion), regressive (would only benefit those who could afford a house), and politically problematic (unfair to people who bought houses they could afford). He also discusses the origin of the tea party: Santelli’s original “tea party” protest of bailing out underwater homeowners.

It is sometimes unclear in audible format when the author is speaking for himself, and when he is quoting someone else. Given that the author is very fair to people he disagrees with, I hope I didn’t attribute thoughts to him that he in fact disagrees with.

You will probably find the book a hard read if you don’t have a good familiarity with the 2008 financial crisis, the early years of the Obama administration, and the people involved. I previously read Tim Geithner’s “Stress Test” and Alan Blinder’s “After the Music Stopped” which were good background for this book.

Overall the book is more assertion than argument. Of course, it is hard to prove a counterfactual, so I don’t hold this against the author. Given that the economic recovery disappointed and inflation remained muted, it’s easy with 20/20 hindsight to argue that the stimulus was too small, but he does show that some evidence for this was available at the time. His assertion that, from a political perspective, political capital would have been better spent on a larger stimulus rather than Obamacare is persuasive. And the focus on shovel ready projects - so as not to stimulate the economy after the recession ended - clearly didn’t pan out. The economy took years to fully recover and would have benefited from infrastructure spending well into the 2010s.

Somewhat complicated, not audiobook material

i found it interesting (not incredibly interesting to be honest) but to me it is a book that needs to be read and not heard. It requires you to understand american politics throughly (I’m a political science student) and still you need to pay very close attention in order to completely understand and not lose track of the topic.

Good information on politicians.

Well done. I have been listening to books on politics and learning about how things happen. Showing how little people really know why things have been going so badly.