Jack Lew has come a long way. As a teenager, the Orthodox Jew from New York was “known for his long hair, faded jeans and boots.” Today, he is President Obama’s Secretary of the Treasury, after the Senate confirmed him on a bipartisan, 71-26 vote. Lew’s term as Treasury Secretary has begun with little controversy. He completed his first foreign trip as secretary last week, heading to China shortly after the formal transfer of power to Xi Jinping. Despite a low-key and rather ordinary start, Lew brings change to the department in terms of experience and ideology.
The appointment of Lew’s predecessor, Timothy Geithner, was widely hailed for breaking the grip of Wall Street on Washington policymaking. Geithner came closest to Wall Street when he ran the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, but he never worked at a bank or hedge fund. (Of course, Geithner did not ultimately remain immune from charges of protecting Wall Street.) By contrast, Lew worked at Citigroup and faced criticism for taking a $900,000 bonus as the COO of the organization after it received over $45 billion in taxpayer dollars during the TARP bailout. During the 2010 confirmation hearings following his appointment as Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), Lew disputed the notion that regulation would have solved the problems that caused the recession. Left-leaning journalist Robert Scheer characterized Lew’s position as a “myopic view of the origins of the economic meltdown.”
However, with the exception of his time at Citigroup, Lew has spent much of his life working with Democratic politicians, another distinction between Lew and Geithner. His first foray into politics came at age 12, when he canvassed for Minnesota politician Eugene McCarthy. Lew later served as a Special Assistant to the President under Bill Clinton and then as the Associate Director of the OMB before being named its director in 1998. When George W. Bush became president, Lew left the public sector to work at New York University and Citigroup until reentering politics with a post at the State Department under Hillary Clinton. In November 2010, the Senate unanimously confirmed Lew’s appointment to his previous post as OMB Director after President Obama nominated him for the job. Subsequently, in January 2012, he replaced William Daley as the White House Chief of Staff and became a key negotiator and liaison between the President and Republican congressional leadership in the coming months.
Aside from jokes about Lew’s almost-cartoonish signature appearing on U.S. currency, real questions have arisen about what he will emphasize as Treasury Secretary. Lew, whose Carleton College advisor was famous liberal senator Paul Wellstone and who worked for noted Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill (D-Mass.), has made clear his political agenda. Speaker of the House John Boehner remarked that during debt negotiations, Lew refused to consider cuts to entitlements, and—despite his ties to Wall Street—The Atlantic described him as “closely aligned with the class-warrior image that Obama adopted during the election campaign.”
Joshua Green, a Bloomberg columnist, noted that the selection of Lew signified Obama’s intention to “drive a hard bargain with Republicans, on tax, spending and entitlement issues” and to use Lew as the focal point in “ongoing budget and entitlement reform negotiations.” As a proclaimed ideologue and hardened veteran of the constant debt negotiations of Obama’s first term, Lew differs from Geithner, who was known as anything but a ‘yes’ man for Obama. He will bring a new perspective to the Treasury Department.
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