Bobo and His Researchers
David Brooks finds himself lost in an Aesop fable:

Some administrations are staffed by hedgehogs, who are guided by a few core principles. But this one is staffed by foxes, who respond flexibly to situations. In the administration’s first big test, that sort of pragmatism paid off.

Being lost in a fable is about the only place Mr. Brooks would be safe in praising Tim Geithner:

[T]he evidence of the past eight months suggests that Geithner was mostly right and his critics were mostly wrong. he financial sector is in much better shape than it was then. TARP money is being repaid, and the debate now is what to do with the billions that were never needed. It now seems clear that nationalization would have been an unnecessary mistake — potentially expensive and dangerously disruptive.

Boiled down, with the eye of newt and toe of frog on the side, Bobo is praising Geithner because he avoided cutting the power of those "too big to fail" banks. No mean feat, that, as it required spending hundreds of billions of US taxpayer dollars while negotiating nothing in exchange for them. Bobo takes pains to disagree with this earlier characterizations of Mr. Geithner, which I think still holds true:

Many people said he looked terrified as the Treasury secretary, like Bambi in the headlights. The New Republic ran an essay called “The Geithner Disaster.”…The Wall Street Journal asked 49 economists to grade Geithner. They gave him an F.

The last sentence is unintentionally funny in a way that is common for Bobo, in that that same Wall Street Journal rates itself and the banksters it covers as AAA. Bobo gives Tim Geithner a AAA rating, too:

Events…vindicate Geithner’s basic policy instincts. The criticism…was that Geithner was neither bold nor visionary. He was too cautious, too much the insider and bureaucrat….But this prudence was the key to his effectiveness.

I wonder if Ohio’s Attorney General will add Bobo to his list of rating agency defendants. Might be a wise move, because when David Brooks praises Mr. Obama’s Goldman Sachs financial team, he is foretelling that something new wicked this way comes.