Obama Needs a B-Team

Dissent among insiders could save his presidency
By Matt Cantor,  Newser Staff
Posted Nov 8, 2010 1:40 PM CST
Obama Needs a B-Team
President Barack Obama walks with his economic team to make a statement on the monthly jobs numbers, Friday, May 7, 2010, outside the Oval Office of the White House in Washington.   (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)

President Obama’s top advisers have had their chance, and Tuesday proves they blew it, writes American Prospect editor Robert Kuttner. The trouble is that “an in-group of experts often becomes an echo chamber, reinforcing their own prejudices and excluding people with different views,” he notes in the Huffington Post. The solution? Bring in a panel of experts with “a very different view of how he should be leading”—a Team B.

While Obama’s current political and economic teams have struggled, plenty of people on the outside had advice. Why not bring in political columnists like Frank Rich, public opinion gurus like Stanley Greenberg, Nobel-winning economists like Joseph Stiglitz? Team B could make a proposal (but the key is that Obama has to be alone with them, "without the team that failed him undermining the critique"), and Team A could respond. "Then we'd have a real Team of Rivals, and maybe save his presidency."
(More President Obama stories.)

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