Geithner must get better after bad start

WASHINGTON — Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner will get much better at making his case to Congress and the American people. I'm confident in that prediction because after watching his debut this week, I don't see how he could get much worse.

Reviews of Geithner's performance in rolling out the Obama administration's financial rescue plan were so uniformly negative that to add my own would be piling on. Too much of the criticism, in any event, focused on style rather than substance. Geithner will inevitably become more comfortable speaking from a witness chair on Capitol Hill, which means he will begin to sound more confident and authoritative. The fact that he looks so young — kind of like "Doogie Howser, Cabinet secretary" — is something that he's going to have to learn to use to his benefit, and that we're just going to have to get used to.

What I hope he learned this week is how closely Americans are following the economic crisis and how angry they are. Geithner rose to prominence in the financial world at a time when it was assumed that brainiacs were running economic policy in Washington and major financial institutions on Wall Street. What did it matter that no one understood a word Alan Greenspan said? There was no need for regular folks to worry about the details.

To put it mildly: Wrong.

It will be a long, long time before it's acceptable for a Treasury secretary, Federal Reserve chairman, corporate CEO or anyone else who plays a powerful role in the economic life of the country to go up to Capitol Hill and say, essentially, "Trust us, we've got this." But by presenting a plan that was all broad outlines and no fine print, that's just what Geithner did.

The most important reaction wasn't the stock market's sudden swoon — nearly 400 points in the Dow — following Geithner's appearance Tuesday before the Senate Banking Committee. Remember, his rationale for unveiling the new bailout plan before it was fully baked was to calm the markets. I suspect, though, that Wall Street wouldn't have been happy unless Geithner had announced that his only new initiative would be to dump huge piles of money on street corners in lower Manhattan every morning. Unmarked bills, of course.

Geithner should pay more attention to the unrequited, Old Testament wrath that seems to be brewing over the financial crisis. I know it's dangerous to generalize from anecdotal evidence, but I have to pay attention when, as happened earlier this week, an obviously intelligent, otherwise reasonable-sounding gentleman leaves me a voice mail message calling for "public executions" of Wall Street miscreants.